Shortest time interval measured

New developments are producing to ever more accurate time technologies
Scientists claim they have measured the shortest interval of time ever.
Researchers used short pulses of laser light to produce images of electrons leaving atoms and recorded what happened to within 100 attoseconds.

To imagine how long this is, if 100 attoseconds is stretched so that it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale.

Scientists used the technique to record the dynamics of electrons in atoms and report their findings in Nature.

The research team employed extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light pulses to excite atoms, prompting them to emit electrons, the small negatively charged particles that are a fundamental part of every atom.

"We accelerate the electrons spinning around the nucleus. Some pick up so much energy that they leave the atoms forever," Professor Ferenc Krausz, of the Technische Universitat Wien, in Austria, told BBC News Online.

Future clocks

At the same time, the scientists used a device called a Few-Cycle Laser to capture "tomographic images" of these electrons that gave information about how they behaved with time.

This allowed the scientists to distinguish events within 100 attoseconds, the shortest interval of time ever recorded.


THE ATTOSECOND
An attosecond is one quintillionth (10 to the power of minus 18) of a second
Caesium atomic clocks are accurate to one second over many millions of years. The development of laser counters will push clocks to theoretical billion-year accuracy. The clocks' technology will be used in telecommunications and experiments testing fundamental theories in physics. They will also be used to time important processes in biologocal cells, to aid our understanding of disease. The advance opens up the possibility of more accurate timekeeping.

Existing atomic clocks are very accurate and measure time by counting the number of times caesium atoms jump back and forth between different energy levels.

An angstrom is 10 to the minus 10 meters. One ten billionth of a meter. My high school physics teacher used to say a "Jiffy" was the length of time it took light to travel one angstrom.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

The shortest time measured is the time between when a NYC traffic light turns green, and when the car behind you blows his horn.

Johnny Carson joke 20 yrs ago....

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'87 924S
'81 280SEL

Sold ->

81 300SD -
93 300E w/ 3.2
85 300D-
79 300SD
82 300CD
83 300CD - CA
87 190E 5 spd
87 Porsche 924S

"..I'll take a simple "C" to "G" and feel brand new about it..."

Just to blow some dust off the circuits, I figure that the aforementioned "Jiffy" would be 3.34 x 10 to the -19th power second, approximately, as Spock would say.

The article described the attosecond as 10 to the -18th power second. Of course, the "jiffy" was never actually measured -- just conceived as a mathematical likelihood.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

He was wrong...it's how long the oil tech takes to strip out your oil pan drain plug threads ........


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[http://languageandgrammar.com/2008/01/14/youve-got-problems-not-issues/ ]

"A liberal is someone who feels they owe a great debt to their fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

You've heard some stories about that, no doubt.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Are you kidding ? I have lost count of the number of times I get under with my wrench to find someone with gravel rash on their knuckles has bolted/crammed in, one of those 'fit's all' self threading drain bolts !




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[http://languageandgrammar.com/2008/01/14/youve-got-problems-not-issues/ ]

"A liberal is someone who feels they owe a great debt to their fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

Yeah, I was ribbin' you. I figured you'd dealt with a few botched jobs in that category. I've run into that sort of "this bolt seems to go in tight" kind of crap working on old rigs. I run into it all the time in home repair where someone who didn't have a clue about how to proceed just gave me more work to do at a future date.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K