Nature Photonics

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Physicists clock electron tunneling at the space-time limit

Published the underlying study

Physicists in Regensburg have timed a single electron tunneling through an energy barrier to within a fraction of a femtosecond. The measurement, published in Nature Photonics, is the first to watch an electron's quantum motion at both atomic spatial scale and attosecond time scale.

Updated 3 days ago

Sculpted light steers attosecond electron bursts in a tunnelling microscope

New Capabilities

Publisher of the research paper

For more than four decades, the scanning tunnelling microscope has read a steady trickle of current, resolving atoms but saying nothing about how electrons move at their natural timescale. A team at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, working with theorists in France and Spain, has now fired bursts of tunnelling current through an STM junction lasting 860 attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second, and steered which direction they flow using only the shape of a two-colour laser pulse.

Updated Oct 24