Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Yoctosecond Photon Pulse?

We have had attosecond and zeptosecond time scale for photon pulses, but now comes yoctosecond! I'm not all that up on these various terminology, and I had to go look up what yoctosecond is. It is 10^-24 second. A new paper published in PRL this week talks about the possibility of producing photon pulses of that time scale from heavy-ion collisions such as from the one at RHIC[1].

What comes after yoctosecond?

Zz.

[1] A. Ipp et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. v.103, p.152301 (2009).

Edit : There's a coverage of this work in APS Physics. You might even get free access to the paper!

2 comments:

FingO said...

The whole Paper is just amazing.

The concept of yoctosecond pump-probe-spectroscopy presented in the Paper is also quite exciting. Investigating QGP- and intranuclear dynamics with it, sweet! And using QGP as a source (which are generated with heavy-ion collisions) sounds even more awesome.

Perhaps I print "Yoctosecond photon Pulse" on a t-shirt. At least I know where to go after my PhD.

AFAIK, there is no official unit after yocto. Another motivation to make even shorter pulses, then I can give this new unit a name.

Einstein's Brain said...

I guess not. I am thinking that's awesome! I just looked up that on Wikipedia. I also learned of femtoseconds, and there's even "femtochemistry". Interesting stuff.