Emily Chan
The fastest microscope in the world has been created, and it can see electrons moving. Scientists hope the new device will help them learn more about the behavior of electrons.
The microscope is an advanced version of a transmission electron microscope. It can capture images of electrons with electron pulses at a speed of one quintillionth of a second.
Electrons travel at roughly 1,367 miles per second. They can circumnavigate the Earth in just 18.4 seconds.
The small and speedy nature of the particles makes them extremely difficult to study. The microscope can possibly lead to new discoveries about how the tiny particles take flight.
“This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before—like electrons,” Mohammed Hassan, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona.
“With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”
In the early 2000s, physicists developed methods of generating tiny attosecond pulses to create an exposure time that could capture electron movements. This resulted in the scientists who actually created the pulses to earn the Nobel Prize in physics.
Attoseconds are a unit of time in the International System of Units, and one attosecond equals 1×10^-18. An attosecond is to a second what a second is to the age of the universe.
Limiting the exposure time to a few attoseconds led physicists to discover how electrons behave inside liquid water and semiconductors, how they carry charge and how chemical bonds between atoms rip apart. Previously, the shortest timescale was 43 attoseconds.
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