German scientists are known for their innovations and latest discoveries. One more breakthrough in which they announced that they measured the shortest period ever- a Zeptosecond. Nuclear Physicists from Goethe University at the DESY accelerator facility, which is located in Hamburg, have executed and measured a process that reveals the discovery of zeptoseconds for the first time, .i.e. the transmission of light within a molecule which is the shortest time, called zeptoseconds, that has been successfully measured to date”. Particle interactions were observed in attoseconds. One attosecond is a thousand times as long as a zeptosecond.
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Zeptosecond-Smallest unit of time:
In 1999, Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian chemist, measured the speed at which molecules modify their shape. He proposed femtochemistry using ultrashort laser flash, which results in the formation and breakup of chemical bonds that occur in the measure of femtoseconds. He received the Nobel prize for those in 1999. A femtosecond is equal to 0.000000000000001 seconds or simply 10-15 seconds.
Recently, researchers discovered while studying how long it took a photon, a particle of light, to cross a hydrogen molecule. Physicists used X-rays from the PETRA III at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, which is a particle accelerator. The researchers control and set the energy of the X-rays to allow one photon, which will be enough to eject both electrons from the hydrogen molecule, thus irradiating a single hydrogen molecule by using PETRA III laser. Naturally, electrons behave like both particles and waves simultaneously called wave-particle duality, which can be done using a double-slit experiment. So the ejection of the first electron causes it to launch in the first hydrogen molecule and, after, the second hydrogen molecule atom, with the waves merging in the following succession. They concluded that the photon crossed the hydrogen molecule in 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is equivalent to one trillionth of a billionth of a second. i.e. 10-21.
Achievement:
This accuracy is a huge achievement and a world record compared to the Nobel Prize-winning work that first measured time in femtoseconds in 1999 by Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail, which are millionths of billionths of seconds.
The photon produces electron waves from the electron cloud of the single hydrogen molecule, which can interfere with each other, forming a pattern. The interference pattern seen is slightly skewed to the right side, making us calculate and measure how long the photon must get from one atom to the next one.
Through this, one can measure that it takes a photon 247 zeptoseconds to pass through the hydrogen molecule. It matches what they had expected, based on the speed of light (3×108 m/s) and the known diameter of a single hydrogen molecule. Through this, future experiments would manage to capture even smaller periods.
Summary:
It takes femtoseconds to break and form chemical bonds, but it takes zeptoseconds for light to run across one hydrogen molecule. To measure it, German nuclear physicist and professor of atomic physics Reinhard Dörner of Goethe University and his colleagues used PETRA III at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a particle accelerator to shoot X-rays.