Faster than a speeding bullet? Big deal, says theoretical physicist Thomas Brabec. That kind of speed doesn’t even register on his notion of fast.
Brabec, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Ultrafast Photonics at the University of Ottawa, is in the vanguard of a brand of physics – attophysics – that promises the unimaginable: an atomic-level camera that uses ultrafast pulses of light to produce freeze-action images of nuclear and electron processes.
“It’s an idea or concept at the moment. If it works, it’s revolutionary. But there are many obstacles to be overcome,” says Brabec, one of six recipients of a 2004 Steacie Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
While working at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria during the mid-1990s, Brabec developed the theoretical underpinnings that led to the creation of five-femtosecond (five-millionths of a billionth of a second) laser pulses, the world’s fastest at the time.
But in describing his latest work, Brabec lets slip that he thinks these femtosecond laser flashes are now electromagnetic slowpokes. He has his theoretical sights set a thousand times faster, on attosecond pulses. An athlete who won a race by an attosecond would be ahead by less than the width of an atom.
Though still in its embryonic stage, attosecond science holds the promise of resolving a new atomic and molecular horizon by using speeds and wavelengths of energy that can see nuclear and electron-level details.
