Shortest flash of light – strobes aren’t even close
Jul 4th, 2008 by Brad
As American’s look up tonight to see the flashes of light produced by fireworks, they need to realize that those light bursts last a very long time. To get a really really REALLY short flash one needs to work a lot harder.
Researchers have created the shortest-ever flash of light which lasted only 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second). They pulsed already fast pulses of light on specialized (chirped) mirrors to intersect on jets of neon gas to create this super-short pulses.
The 80 attosecond laser pulse that illuminates neon atoms that the first 2500 attosecond pulse is traveling through. The longer laser pulse ionizes the neon atoms and causes them to glow. All of this happens so quickly that we only see about one and and a half oscillations of the first pulse, basically just two high peaks and a deep wave valley between them. Again what we are seeing is not the first laser pulse but its ionizing effect on the neon atoms as it passes through them.
How what sorts of things happen on these time scales? Well, to put all of this into perspective, it takes only 24 attoseconds for an electron to travel from one side of a hydrogen atom to the other.
How short can they go? …well according to Quantum physics the smallest measurement of time one Planck time (10-44 sec). So this pulse was 80*1026; times longer. So they still have some way to go 🙂
My thoughts:
Why does this matter to art or artists? As we all come to grips with the ultimate realities it should inform our art. Or maybe we should all dump conceptual art and head back to liturgical art. Influences and inspirations can come from all fields of inquiry.
Max-Planck Institute press release.
For those of you confused on wheter if light is a wave or particle. You must realize it is neither — it is its own thing. Light has some qualities we ascribe to waves in our experience and some qualities we ascribe to particles in our experience.
Eric Towers put it this way (Sat Jun 21 05:39:27 BST 2008)
Light is neither a wave nor a particle. A photon is a probability density function on the product space of positions and momenta. (Product space, classically. Adding relativity, the space is slightly deformed.) Insofar as this distribution can be projected onto the position subspace, the photon is a “smeared out” particle. Insofar as this distribution can be projected onto the momentum subspace, the photon is a “smeared out” wave.
The error is one of “cart before the horse”. “Wave” and “Particle” are idealizations created as models to help us understand the world. These two concepts are simplifications, fictions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that anything in the natural world somehow implements any of our fictions. So it is always backwards to ask “is a photon a wave?” or “is a photon a particle?”. It is proper to ask “what particle-like (or wave-like) behavior does this photon exhibit?” I.e. It is proper to ask to what degree some natural phenomenon can be adequately modeled by some idealization.
