Michael Krüger

New Capabilities

Led the team that demonstrated directional attosecond current control in a scanning tunnelling microscope

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