An international team of researchers from the universities of Colorado (USA), Tsing Hua (Taiwan) and Salamanca (Spain), has managed to generate and measure an isolated attosecond pulse in the X-ray regime . The finding has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
This achievement represents a significant breakthrough after previously demonstrating the generation of coherent X-rays by laser, since it combines the two most desired properties in attosecond pulses: that it is isolated, and of high energy . To achieve this, scientists have used attosecond pulse generation and propagation simulation codes, pushing them to the limit in order to reproduce the extreme conditions present in this experiment, all using the Janus supercomputer from the University of Colorado, which operates with more 1,000 processors at a time .
“Currently the development of technology is based on the control of the smallest processes that exist in nature, for example, those that occur at scales lower than one thousandth of a millimeter have given rise to nanotechnology”, explains Luis Plaja, scientist from the University of Salamanca, and Carlos Hernández García, currently at the Join Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado (USA).
This advance will help to improve ultra-fast processes in the field of nanotechnology , as it has meant a leap towards the domain of extremely fast processes at very high energies; Although, according to the researchers, there is still a long way to go to observe and master processes up to a million times faster than ultra-fast electronics .
