Shedding Light on Attosecond Science in Canada

To make an analogy on how attosecond science works, think of how a camera captures a snapshot of an object in motion over time. To increase the details, a high speed strobe and a high speed camera can be used to freeze even finer moments in time. The shorter the light pulse, the more details you can capture.You have probably seen high speed Images of a humming bird hovering to eat nectar from a flower or a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun and thought that was amazing. Those details were captured in the millisecond and microsecond time frames. As units of time shrink, we go from milliseconds, to microseconds, to nanoseconds, to picoseconds, to femtoseconds, to attoseconds and eventually zeptoseconds. Each step shrinks to one thousand times smaller time intervals that seem infinitely small.

An attosecond is very short, a billionth of a billionth, of a second. That’s 10 to the minus 18th power or 0.000000000000000001 of a second. Physicists who study atomic motion have determined that the oscillation of an electron orbiting a hydrogen atom moves from one side of the atom to the other every 24 attoseconds. The shortest laser pulse generated to date has been 50 attoseconds which can freeze the action of an electron in motion around an atom. Using pulsed ultra-fast table top Infra-red lasers, sophisticated electro-optical setups, vacuum chambers,etc, one can pump and probe molecules to better understand the fundamental physics of chemistry and atomic forces. In order to resolve finer details and see smaller objects like molecules and atoms lasers of shorter wavelength have to be used. Shorter wavelength lasers like ultra-violet and free-electron X-ray lasers are planned as the next generation of lasers used to gain a better insight of quantum physics and the forces that ultimately bond everything together. Canada is playing a major role in leading attosecond science research.

The newly opened “Joint Laboratory for Attosecond Science” is located in Ottawa, Canada and the Director is Paul Corkrum. Mr. Corkrum is a pioneering researcher in Attosecond science, being a laser and plasma physicist with Canada’s National Research Council and the University of Ottawa. The Joint Laboratory for Attosecond Science will be the new home of Canada’s fastest X-ray laser at 80 million pulses per second. The science allowed by ultrafast lasers in the attosecond regime will shed new light on understanding chemistry on the molecular and atomic level. Research at the Joint Laboratory for Attosecond Science (JASLab) may lead to scientific breakthroughs in health care, diagnostic medicine, quantum computing, nanotechnology, environmental science and energy. You never know what you might discover, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you go. Marvels and mysteries are lying in wait, yet to be revealed.

To learn more about attosecond science visit http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/seminars/online/PSC/corkum2/.