Exploring science at a subatomic level — one attosecond at a time

Take a behind-the-scenes look at attosecond research with award-winning National Research Council scientist Dr. Paul Corkum as he attempts to capture a still image of electrons in motion using a terawatt laser. The laser operates with a wavelength so powerful it’s not visible to the human eye.

Learn more about the Joint Laboratory for Attosecond Science (JASLab).

Video length: 3:22 min
Video clip courtesy of Twin Cities Public Television

Video Transcript

Narrator: Welcome to the brave new world of the very, very small; where nature builds life from the ground up; where crucial events take place on time scales so short they boggle the mind, down to a billionth of a billionth of a second, an interval known as an "attosecond". Meet the undisputed master of this timescale, Dr. "Attosecond" himself, Paul Corkum.

Dr. Paul Corkum: If you want to understand that world of you and me or the reactions that power the outside world, your car, when you want to understand them at the fundamental level, then you must go to those fastest of the timescales. So it's a timescale of chemistry; and attoseconds… that's the time it takes electrons to move around. An electron and atom are a molecule moving pretty fast and if you take a dimension of the atom and you ask, "How long it takes to move?" it's attoseconds.

Narrator: Corkum is attempting something that has never been done before… to take a snapshot of an electron in motion. His tool is a laser, one with a wavelength beyond human vision. It emits a series of extremely short, extremely powerful pulses.

Dr. Paul Corkum: The laser driving this attosecond pulse is a terawatt laser. That means each time it fires, it consumes the power that is consumed in all of North America.

Narrator: By harnessing all that energy, Corkum will use the laser lika a strobe to photograph the sub-atomic world. The laser blasts an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom, producing a series of afterimages. These snapshots capture the orbit of the electron around the atomic nucleus, in a slice of time, lasting only 50 billionths of a billionth of a second.

Dr. Paul Corkum: This is a train of pulses here. I know it’s a train because these lines are separated. So there are special colours selected out.

Narrator: For science, this ultrafast frontier, promises to open up the hidden world of the most fundamental phenomena. But Corkum believes that even this may one day come to seem to be, well… slow.

Dr. Paul Corkum: We would not be ourselves and trees would not grow if there were not things going on at this timescale in nature. And, we would not have them at all if we were not thinking about faster and faster. We just wouldn’t understand it and so it‘s essential to do it and why would we ever stop here? Why would we stop before we got to even the most fundamental parts of atoms and molecules?