{"id":163515,"date":"2023-05-08T04:22:50","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T09:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/plucking-an-atoms-electrons"},"modified":"2023-05-08T04:22:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T09:22:50","slug":"plucking-an-atoms-electrons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/plucking-an-atoms-electrons","title":{"rendered":"Plucking an Atom\u2019s Electrons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/plucking-an-atoms-electrons.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Twenty years ago, Ferenc Krausz, Theodor H\u00e4nsch, and their collaborators used a femtosecond near-infrared (NIR) laser to compel neon atoms to emit pulses of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light that lasted a few hundred attoseconds. The landmark feat depended on the laser\u2019s strong oscillating electric field, which tore away the atoms\u2019 valence electrons and hurled them back half a cycle later. Now Tobias Heldt of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear <i>Physics<\/i> in Germany and his collaborators have developed a new experimental technique that is, in a sense, a mirror image of the 2003 demonstration: they used attosecond XUV pulses to free the valence electrons and to then track their response to femtosecond NIR laser pulses [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v16\/s61#c1\" class=\"\">1<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>When a few-cycle femtosecond NIR pulse passes through helium gas, the atoms\u2019 dipole moments fluctuate as the electrons move away and then recollide. Those fluctuations in turn are manifest in the gas\u2019s absorption spectrum. Heldt and his collaborators set out to measure the fluctuations and, from them, infer the electrons\u2019 trajectories.<\/p>\n<p>The attosecond XUV pulse in their experiment did double duty. It ionized the helium atoms to bring the electrons under the influence of the NIR pulse. It also interfered with the fluctuating dipole moments. As a result, the XUV pulse carried away the dipoles\u2019 spectral imprint, which the team measured with a grating spectrometer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty years ago, Ferenc Krausz, Theodor H\u00e4nsch, and their collaborators used a femtosecond near-infrared (NIR) laser to compel neon atoms to emit pulses of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light that lasted a few hundred attoseconds. The landmark feat depended on the laser\u2019s strong oscillating electric field, which tore away the atoms\u2019 valence electrons and hurled them [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1694,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163515","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}