It is the shortest time measurement ever on a hydrogen (H2) molecule that was X-ray irradiated from the PETRA III X-ray laser source inside the DESY acceleration facility in Hamburg.
The experts measured the time it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule. And that time is just 247 zeptoseconds (247 billionths of a second).
A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeros and a 1. This is a huge leap from the 1999 Nobel Prize winner who first measured time in femtoseconds, which they are millionths of a billionths of a second.
Femtoseconds are needed for the chemical bonds to break and form, but it takes zeptoseconds for light to travel through a single hydrogen (H2) molecule. To measure this extremely short transit, German physicists took X-rays from PETRA III at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), a particle accelerator in Hamburg.
The researchers fixed the energy of the X-rays so that a single photon, or particle of light, removed the two electrons from the hydrogen molecule. The photon bounced one electron off the molecule and then the other. These interactions created a wave pattern that they were able to measure with a tool called a cold target recoil ion motion spectroscopy reaction microscope (COLTRIMS). The COLTRIMS microscope recorded both the interference pattern and the position of the hydrogen molecule throughout the interaction.
Time? Two hundred forty-seven zeptoseconds. Today, a record number.
Referencia: Zeptosecond Birth Time Delay in Molecular Photoionization, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abb9318
