Technion–Israel Institute of Technology

New Capabilities

Co-led the study

Molybdenum survives temperatures that would melt most metals, but at room temperature it can crack without warning. Reforming its internal crystal grains has required heating the entire part to about 1,000 °C.

Updated Yesterday

New Capabilities

Lead institution behind the experiment

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