X-ray pulses that last for less than a femtosecond (!) have been created for the first time by physicists in Austria.
Ferenc Krausz of the University of Technology of Vienna and colleagues have used the ultra-short bursts of X-rays to probe the ionization of krypton, a process that takes place too quickly for existing techniques to detect. The breakthrough marks the transition from tracking fast molecular processes to monitoring the ultra-fast dynamics of a whole range of sub-atomic events on an attosecond (10^-18 seconds) time-scale (M Hentschel et al 2001 Nature 414 509).
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