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:
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.
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.
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