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CTOnews.com, January 29 (Xinhua)-- German scientists have created the shortest short electronic pulse to date, with a duration of only 53 attoseconds, or 53 billionths of a second. This achievement may lead to more accurate electron microscopes, capture clear, still images at the atomic level, and speed up the transmission of data in computer chips.

CTOnews.com learned that electronic pulses are used to represent data in a computer or to capture images in an electron microscope. The shorter the pulse, the faster the transmission of information, and researchers have been working to shorten the duration of electronic pulses as much as possible.

Eleftherios Goulielmakis of the University of Rostock in Germany and his colleagues have been trying to shorten the length of the pulse as much as possible. The electron pulse produced by the electric field in an ordinary circuit is limited by the frequency at which the electron oscillates in the matter. A pulse needs to last at least half a cycle of these oscillations, because it is this period that creates a "driving force" for electrons, Goulielmakis said. Light oscillates at a much higher frequency, so his team has been using short light to trigger electronic pulses.

In 2016, Goulielmakis's team created a visible flash that lasted only 380 attoseconds. Using the same technology, the team focused the laser and pushed electrons from the tip of the tungsten needle into a vacuum, obtaining an electron pulse that lasted only 53 attoseconds, shorter than the light pulse that started it. In Bohr's hydrogen atom model, this duration is 1/5 of the time that electrons in a hydrogen atom travel around its nucleus, Goulielmakis said.

Such a short electron pulse allows the electron microscope to focus on a shorter period of time, just like reducing the shutter speed of the camera to reveal the motion of the particles more clearly.

"if we use our electron pulses to create an electron microscope, then we have enough resolution to not only see the atoms in motion, which will already be exciting, but even see how electrons jump between these atoms," Goulielmakis said.

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