Nature Photonics

New Capabilities

Publisher of the research paper

For four decades, the scanning tunnelling microscope has read a steady trickle of current, resolving atoms but saying nothing about how electrons move at their natural timescale. A team at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, working with theorists in Germany, France and Spain, has now fired bursts of tunnelling current through an STM junction lasting 860 attoseconds — and steered which direction they flow, using only the shape of a two-colour laser pulse. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second.

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