Ultrafast control

摘要

One attosecond is one-millionth of one-millionth of one-millionth of a second. If the next second of your life were expanded to fill the history of the Universe, then one attosecond would correspond to less than one second of that history. In one attosecond (10~(-18) s), light travels slightly further than the length of a single water molecule, and the molecule itself appears utterly frozen. The natural vibrations of a molecule take place over tens of thousands of attosec-onds, and rotations take millions of atto-seconds―a relative eternity. Even the rapid motion of atomic electrons is typically measured in hundreds to thousands of atto-seconds; and a single oscillation of a wave of visible light lasts nearly 2,000 attoseconds.