Wired had an article titled “Laser-Firing Physicists Take High-Speed Photography to the Attosecond Range“.
Capturing images of fleeting events — a horse’s gallop, a bullet’s impact, an electron’s escape — is easy if you have the right equipment. Faster camera shutters used to be enough, but recently lasers have let physicists break the femto- and attosecond barriers, compressing the temporal resolution of images down to the time it takes light to cross a hydrogen atom.
They mentioned two examples of high speed photography utilizing ultrafast lasers.
4) Element Melting
Shooter R. J. Dwayne Miller, 2007
Shutter speed 300 femtoseconds (300 x 10-15)
By the 1980s, lasers could deliver bursts of light faster than a single molecular vibration. A “pump” pulse triggers a reaction, and a “probe” pulse follows, acting like a strobe. Miller, a University of Toronto chemist, melted aluminum with a laser and used an electron pulse to catch the action at a molecular level. Now he’s working on silicon.
Photo: Christoph T. Hebeisen
5) Electron drift
Shooter
Ferenc Krausz, 2007
Shutter speed 110
attoseconds (110 x 10-18)
The pump-probe technique has been modified to pare pulse times to attoseconds by using photons emitted when electrons get excited out of their orbit and crash back in. That’s short enough to measure the movement of other electrons as they enter an extreme UV wave. The pairs of dotted lines span the time between two electron crossings.
spirit01, originally uploaded by chasdobie.
BIOLASE Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLTI), the world’s leading dental laser company, announced today that it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowing it to market a version of its Waterlase® MD Laser System for use in dermatological applications as well as general and plastic surgery.
Jake St. Philip, Chief Executive Officer, said, “Our singular operational focus today is executing in the dental suite and building on the success of our hard- and soft-tissue dental laser franchise. That said, FDA clearances such as we announced today only serve to build on our proprietary intellectual assets and add value that can be monetized through licensing, partnerships and in some cases future product offerings. We are very pleased with the new indications and applaud the scientific and regulatory teams for this accomplishment.”
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SpectraGenics, a leader in light-based therapeutic beauty devices, today announced over-the-counter (OTC) clearance from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for their patented hand-held laser hair removal device designed for at-home use. The TRIA is the first hair removal laser to enter the U.S. home-based device market, an industry projected to grow exponentially over the next three years. more…
Gold platinum blue titanium and gold aluminum. Credit: Richard Baker University of Rochester
Using a tabletop laser, a University of Rochester optical scientist has turned pure aluminum, gold. And blue. And gray. And many other colors. And it works for every metal tested, including platinum, titanium, tungsten, silver, and gold.
Researchers create gold aluminum, black platinum, blue silver
Researchers from St. Petersburg have designed and produced a device that enables to promptly and accurately identify the sizes of micro- and nano-particles. The laser ray illuminates the object in the device so that to judge about the particle sizes by intensity of light diffused by the particles.
link: Russian “Laska” Laser to Measure Particles
