An Electron Filmed for the First Time
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Stumble ThisAn electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. Credit: Lund University
Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle's movements directly.
Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle's movements directly.
oh and why do electrons sound like machinery on the Enterprise?
>> I want to be in the room when somebody solves the last remaining question about the universe mathematically.
I think you will be long dead before that happens. We are at the begging not at the end.
great video thanks allot for the post.
An electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. Credit: Lund University
Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle's movements directly.
Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron's movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event.
Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to get the job done.
"It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden.
Using another laser, scientists can guide the motion of the electron to capture a collision between an electron and an atom on film.
The length of the film Mauritsson and his colleagues made corresponds to a single oscillation of a wave of light . The speed of the event has been slowed down for human eyes. The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.'
i'm still confused at what i'm looking at. are the bands the shell of an atom? or is that what an electron looks like traveling around something? or is the whole thing the waves of an electron??
You can't see electrons, period. Of all the different kinds of particles in the universe, the human eye evolved to detect just one kind: the photon. You see photons by them passing through the optics in the front of your eye, impacting chemicals in the back of the eye and thus setting off chemical reactions that eventually lead to nerve impulses. The eye as a whole extracts information from photons that the brain then processes to create the imagery we see. "Seeing" imagery is just thinking, no different than doing a math problem in your head. We don't think of it as thinking because it is so vivid and automatic(to our consciousness), but thats just due to all the resources evolution put into developing the ability.
Photons interact with electrons, so you could see photons that electrons give off(in fact, this is what happens with basically every thing you see). An electron in motion, giving off photons at a fast enough rate, could then be seen as a featureless line tracing the path of the electron, but that is the limit of the imagery you could see. Individual electrons can not be percieved as objects with size or shape because of how photons interact with them. With an apple, photons leave the apple from different points on its surface, entering the surface of the eye at different points at different angles, thus conveying information about the shape of the apple; the apple has a size, shape, and surface exactly because it's made of multiple particles spread over different locations.
Worse, electrons can't be made to hold still, and it's impossible to tell exactly where they are due to quantum mechanics. To make a guess at what we're seeing in the video: it's a computer generated map of the wave function of the electron, with each speck of that blue fuzziness being a possible location of the electron. The average location of the specks oscillates up and down as the electron "circles" the atom(electrons don't really do that, but I've typed enough already).
I know a positron when I see one.
I am pretty much just reiterating Sineral's great post, probably without as much knowledge on this as him, but I am just glad that Videosift is not the same as digg/youtube.
It's extremely frustrating to read youtube/digg comments on this, to hear people talk about QM where they have no idea what an electron is.
Why in the world are people talking about QuantumMushroom on YouTube?