Attosecond laser - the worldâ€s fastest flash

Description: Attosecond laser - the world’s fastest flashResearch Field: High Energy and Plasma Physics/Quantum OpticsFor years, various laboratories throughout the world have been in competition to develop ever shorter laser light pulses. The Hungarian physicist, Ferenc Krausz, at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, has now made an important breakthrough: he has created an attosecond laser in the lab.An attosecond is 0. 000 000 000 000 001 seconds -an incredibly short amount of time. For lay people, all those zeros are practically meaningless. Scientists, on the other hand, live for this kind of precision. Nevertheless, we, too, benefit from every zero after the decimal point placed by basic researchers: such precision makes it possible for surgeons to correct vision by operating on the cornea with ultra-short laser pulses, for the automotive industry to bore holes in injection nozzles, and for car drivers to find their way with navigation devices that use atomic clocks to set their course.With the attosecond laser, it will now be possible for the first time to photograph the movement of electrons inside atoms - a prerequisite for developing new materials with yet unknown properties.Copyright: © Deutsche Welle, 2005Published at ScienceStage.com in cooperation with the Max Planck Society.Involved Institutes: Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics