You often hear and read about cameras capturing images at 100th of a second. Would it give you a jolt if you hear about a flashlight that captures light images of 80 attoseconds long. Yes, it’s very much possible with Goulielmakis and his colleagues who have done the impossible, ah! the word sounds rubbish of late, seting this record. The team produced light pulses by firing incredibly tiny laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas, done by hemming the trigger-pulse photons into a dense bunch by means of a tool called chirped mirror. Computer analysis of the image has testified the ingenuity of the experiment. This was done akin to a fair photo-finish image. The previous one boasted the shortest light pulse of 130 attoseconds. Marangos at Imperial College London, UK, is hopeful of producing zeptosecond pulses of trillionths of a billionth of a second in the near future.

Source: NewScientist260317