Scientists film an electron for first time

Swedish scientists have filmed an electron for the first time, showing it riding on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom.

Lund University researchers used a newly developed technology for generating short pulses from intense laser light -- so-called attosecond pulses -- to capture an electron's motion for the first time..

It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom, said Lund Assistant Professor Johan Mauritsson. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second.

We have long been promising the research community that we will be able to use attosecond pulses to film electron motion, said Mauritsson, who co-led the study with Professor Anne L'Huillier. Now that we have succeeded, we can study how electrons behave when they collide with various objects.

The accomplishment is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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