Researcher probes the secret life of electrons

ELECTRONS DART within and between atoms far too quickly for current imaging techniques to observe their motion. To capture fast-moving objects without a blur, a photographer can use a camera flash to light up a scene for an instant. Julia Mikhailova, an assistant professor of mechanical  and aerospace engineering, hopes to capture electron motion in a similar way, but her camera flash must last only a few attoseconds — just millionths of a trillionth of a second.

Mikhailova and her team use lasers and plasmas, which are collections of charged particles, to create attosecond pulses of light. “With these pulses one can observe the action inside atoms and molecules,” Mikhailova said. These observations could help researchers predict electron behavior, leading to a better understanding of everything from chemical reactions to superconductivity.

Lasers cannot by themselves produce such brief pulses. Instead, scientists scatter high-powered laser light off a stream of gas. Too much energy from the laser, however, can strip the electrons in the gas from their atoms to make a plasma that no longer scatters light in the right way.

Mikhailova and her team, with funding from the National Science Foundation, are taking a different approach. Instead of using a gas target, they aim a much higher-powered laser at a solid glass disc, creating a dense plasma at its surface. The laser light — an oscillating electromagnetic field — accelerates the electrons in the plasma toward nearly the speed of light. At these speeds, Newton’s physics breaks down and relativity takes over, causing the release of light in the form of attosecond pulses.

To improve the technique, Matthew Edwards, a graduate student in Mikhailova’s lab, ran simulations of plasma-laser interactions on Princeton’s TIGRESS high-performance computer cluster. The results, published Sept. 16, 2016, in the journal Physical Review Letters, showed that mixing laser light with light at harmonic frequencies — which are multiples of the original laser’s frequency — increases the efficiency of the process.

In a paper published Feb. 24, 2016, in the journal Physical Review A, the researchers proposed an extremely efficient two-target system: the first target generates light with harmonic frequencies, which hits the second target to generate attosecond pulses. With such powerful pulses, a new domain becomes visible, Mikhailova said. “We may be able to really see what the electron is doing as it ‘orbits’ in the atom.” –By Bennett McIntosh