The fully coherent free electron laser FERMI paves the way to control ultrafast electron motion

 
Image: Maurizio Contran, Politenico Milano
An international team has used the light produced by the Free Electron Laser FERMI at the research Centre Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste in the AREA Science Park to control the ultrafast movement of electrons: the experiment, published in the journal Nature Photonics, opens the way to the study of more complex processes which occur in nature on the scale of attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second), such as photosynthesis, combustion, catalysis and atmospheric chemistry.
 
Chemical, physical and biological processes are intrinsically dynamic, because they depend not only on the atomic and electronic structure of matter, but also on how they evolve in time. Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel prize (1999) for “femtochemistry”: the observation and control of dynamic chemical processes using ultrafast laser pulses, of a few millionths of a billionth of a second (femtoseconds). This is the scale of time on which atoms make or break bonds in chemical or biological processes, such as photosynthesis or combustion.
 
 
Nature however can be still “faster”. The atoms in a molecule move on the scale of femtoseconds, but the electrons, which are the basis of chemical bonds, are much faster and in the processes they cause, they move a thousand times faster, that is, tens or hundreds of attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second).
“Like many in the scientific community”, explains Kevin Prince, first author of the article just published, “we have also been working for years to develop innovative analytical methods with attosecond resolution to study and control fast dynamics. With this work, that exploits the exceptional properties of the laser light from FERMI, we can say we have finally achieved our goal.”

The result was achieved by an international team of researchers from Italy (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste, the Politecnico of Milano, the IFN, IOM and ISM institutes of CNR and ENEA), Japan (Tohoku University), Russia (Lomonosov Moscow State University), USA (Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa) and Germany (Technical University of Berlin, University of Freiburg, European XFEL, Hamburg, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg).
 
They used a beam of light of two wavelengths (that is, two different colours) and managed to control the direction of emission of electrons ejected from an atom by the light. The experiment had a time resolution of 3 attoseconds, which now makes possible the study and control extremely fast processes.
“This result opens up new prospects for research on ultrafast processes and for attosecond physics in Italy, and also at the international level” commented Giuseppe Sansone who, with his group at the Politecnico of Milano, contributed to the planning and carrying out of the experiment.
“The next step” concludes Kevin Prince, “will be to apply the technique we have demonstrated to the study of more complex processes which occur on the attosecond scale such as catalytic processes and atmospheric chemistry.”


This research has just been published in the international journal Nature Photonics (DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2016.13).

To read more:
Elettra Top stories: "Controlling electrons with attosecond time resoution”
http://www.medea-horizon2020.eu/)

 

 
Last Updated on Monday, 29 February 2016 17:40