Capturing the Flight of an Electron on Video

Flight of the electron

Swedish scientists recently announced the ability to capture the image of a single electron. This was previously impossible due to the electron's high speed and sensitivity to energy. LiveScience is hosting a video of an electron riding on a light wave after having been pulled away from an atom.

The video doesn't clearly show the electron in flight, but rather a series of pulsating, concentric rings, so it's hard to visualize. The timeframe of the video takes place during the oscillation of a single wavelenth of light, but has been slowed down for human consumption. The soundtrack for the video is corny, so be advised.

What really made my jaw drop, though, was reading the news story on LiveScience about how the scientists used short bursts of laser light, called attosecond pulses, to capture the movement. How short is an attosecond?

"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 Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden [emphasis added].