First film of an electron taken

A FILM CLIP showing an individual electron has appeared for the first time ever.

The movie shows an electron bobbing on a light wave just after leaving an atom.

It was produced by the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in Sweden, in a study directed by atomic physics boffins Professor Anne L'Huillier and Assistant Professor Johan Mauritsson.

Electrons have previously been impossible to photograph successfully because of their extremely high velocities. Good images of electrons couldn't be taken even with very short light pulses because the flashes were too weak to fully illuminate subatomic particles.

The Swedish team of seven scientists used extremely brief pulses of intense laser light and repeated exposures of an identically predictable event to capture a sequence of composite images, greatly slowed down in order to be viewable.

The laser flashes they used are called attosecond pulses. "It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," said Mauritsson.

The film shows the electron's energy distribution. Video is here in avi and mov. µ

L'INQ
Physorg.com