{"id":114565,"date":"2020-10-16T15:24:11","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T22:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/zeptoseconds-new-world-record-in-short-time-measurement"},"modified":"2020-10-16T15:24:11","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T22:24:11","slug":"zeptoseconds-new-world-record-in-short-time-measurement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/zeptoseconds-new-world-record-in-short-time-measurement","title":{"rendered":"Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/zeptoseconds-new-world-record-in-short-time-measurement.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail received the Nobel Prize for measuring the speed at which molecules change their shape. He founded femtochemistry using ultrashort laser flashes: the formation and breakup of chemical bonds occurs in the realm of femtoseconds.<\/p>\n<p>Now, atomic physicists at Goethe University in Professor Reinhard D\u00f6rner\u2019s team have for the first time studied a process that is shorter than femtoseconds by magnitudes. They measured how long it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule: about 247 zeptoseconds for the average bond length of the molecule. This is the shortest timespan that has been successfully measured to date.<\/p>\n<p>The scientists carried out the time measurement on a hydrogen molecule (H<sub>2<\/sub>) which they irradiated with X-rays from the X-ray laser source PETRA III at the Hamburg accelerator facility DESY. The researchers set the energy of the X-rays so that one photon was sufficient to eject both <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electrons\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electrons<\/a> out of the hydrogen molecule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail received the Nobel Prize for measuring the speed at which molecules change their shape. He founded femtochemistry using ultrashort laser flashes: the formation and breakup of chemical bonds occurs in the realm of femtoseconds. Now, atomic physicists at Goethe University in Professor Reinhard D\u00f6rner\u2019s team have for the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}