A flash 300 attoseconds long, squeezed into a spot 100,000 times smaller than a hair

To watch electrons move inside atoms, you need a flash shorter than the movement itself. At the European XFEL facility near Hamburg, a team led by Ichiro Inoue of the University of Tokyo has now focused the hardest, fastest flash yet: X-ray pulses lasting about 300 attoseconds — 300 billionths of a billionth of a second — squeezed by a pair of precision mirror systems into a spot just 180 by 330 nanometres across, roughly 100,000 times smaller than a hair's width. The intensity passed 10 to the power of 20 watts per square centimetre, a world record for hard X-ray attosecond pulses, verified independently by the glow of copper atoms and published in the journal Optica. 'What really matters is what we can deliver to the sample,' said researcher Jiawei Yan. From early 2027, the facility's own mirror system should open the technique to scientists worldwide.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation