Snapshot of an electron - Part 1

Recently, the Nobel Prize for Physics, 2023, was awarded for being able to produce very short pulses of light. Pulses of light that lasted attoseconds. What is an attosecond, you may ask? An attosecond is such a short duration of time that a single second comprises 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them. 

Why did this discovery get the prestigious Nobel Prize? There must be something more to it, right? 

When you take a picture, the camera is exposed to the light outside for a certain time in which it records whatever light strikes its surface. The speed at which the camera opens its shutter to record light and then closes it is called the shutter speed of the camera. But, in the short time that the camera’s shutter is open, if you try to take a picture of a moving car, you record the car’s being at multiple locations at once, and so you see a blur in the image. So, the solution would be to increase the shutter speed. Record the car for a short amount of time, where, during that time of exposure, it is almost perfectly still, so we don’t record its image at many locations at once. 

But what if we wanted to take a picture of electrons, which we can only see by zooming in at an extremely small level, at which they move so fast and their blur is indistinguishable to a field around the electron? 

The behaviour of electrons has always been a very elusive field, especially since the introduction of quantum mechanics. But we would be able to know a lot more about them if we were able to take a snapshot of it at a single moment. If we want to take images of electrons, at the scale we zoom in, the electrons move extremely fast, and we cannot record them without having a massive blur. So what we need to do to stop this blur, is, like a camera, ‘increase the shutter speed’. We start emitting light, and then stop so instantaneously that we can see electrons at one place instead of in a blur. This is where the pulses of light come in. 

But how exactly are these inhumanly fast pulses of light made? We will explore that in Snapshot of an electron- Part 2