{"id":228556,"date":"2026-01-08T01:17:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T07:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/synchronizing-ultrashort-x-ray-pulses-for-attosecond-precision"},"modified":"2026-01-08T01:17:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T07:17:36","slug":"synchronizing-ultrashort-x-ray-pulses-for-attosecond-precision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/synchronizing-ultrashort-x-ray-pulses-for-attosecond-precision","title":{"rendered":"Synchronizing ultrashort X-ray pulses for attosecond precision"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/synchronizing-ultrashort-x-ray-pulses-for-attosecond-precision2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have, for the first time, demonstrated a technique that synchronizes ultrashort X-ray pulses at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL. This achievement opens new possibilities for observing ultrafast atomic and molecular processes with attosecond precision.<\/p>\n<p>Scrutinizing fast atomic and molecular processes in action requires bright and short X-ray pulses\u2014a task in which free-electron lasers such as SwissFEL excel. However, within these X-ray pulses the light is internally disordered: its temporal structure is randomly distributed and varies from shot to shot. This limits the accuracy of certain experiments.<\/p>\n<p>To tame this inherent randomness, a team of PSI researchers has succeeded in implementing a technique known as mode-locking to generate trains of pulses that are coherent in time. \u201cWe can now obtain fully ordered pulses in time and frequency in a very controlled manner,\u201d says accelerator physicist Eduard Prat, who led the study, <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/wn8d-l7sh\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physical Review Letters.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have, for the first time, demonstrated a technique that synchronizes ultrashort X-ray pulses at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL. This achievement opens new possibilities for observing ultrafast atomic and molecular processes with attosecond precision. Scrutinizing fast atomic and molecular processes in action requires bright and short X-ray pulses\u2014a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228556","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=228556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}