Taming Ultrafast Electrons with Light
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] Prof. Daniele Brida, leader of the research group Ultrafast Phenomena in Condensed Matter at the University of Luxembourg together with researchers from the University of Konstanz (Germany), the CNRS-Universiti(C) Paris Sud (France) and the Center for Materials Physics (CFM-CSIC) and Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in San Sebastian (Spain), exploited light to control the motion of electrons in a metallic nanocircuit. In fact, light has the advantage that it oscillates at frequencies that are a million times higher than the ones achieved by electronic circuits.
For this reason, the control of a circuit at optical frequencies has the tremendous potential to revolutionise data processing and computing in the future.
While this goal is still far from being completely achieved, the experiments and theoretical development performed by the international team showed that it is possible to use the single electric field oscillation contained in an ultrashort laser pulse to drive electrons moving at sub-femtosecond time scales within a nanoscopic gap, creating a circuit that otherwise would be open.
The work by the researchers traces the electrons motion at those ultrafast times driven by the taming photon pulse. The story published in the prestigious journal Nature Physics, contains a detailed description of the experiments and the theoretical modeling devoted to understand how electrons move within this open gap between to metallic nanostructures.
Publication: Ludwig, M., Aguirregabiria, G., Ritzkowsky, F. et al. Sub-femtosecond electron transport in a nanoscale gap. Nat. Phys. (2019) doi:10.1038/s41567-019-0745-8
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