Resumen de Ultrafast lasers catch electrons kicking back
Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his team have used laser pulses short enough to photograph any excitons before they "relax" or dissipate. He and his colleagues zapped a 125-nanometre-thick wafer of silica with a 200-attosecond pulse of low-energy X-rays. Then they used similarly short pulses of visible light to take "snapshots" of the system, getting visual evidence that excitons really do form inside such solids although some of them disappear again in just 750 attoseconds.
