Electron cinema: the fastest story ever told.

It is a realm more alien to our experience than the heart of the sun or the other side of the universe, separated from us by a great gulf not of distance, but of brevity.

"Electron cinema: the fastest story ever told" New Scientist p46

It is a realm more alien to our experience than the heart of the sun or the other side of the universe, separated from us by a great gulf not of distance, but of brevity. To the inhabitants of this superfast world, the beat of a human heart is as imperceptibly slow as the drift of the continents is to us. The world is the atom, and its denizens electrons. Their mercurial movements can be over in just attoseconds - billionths of a billionth of a second - yet they drive our electronic devices, every chemical reaction in nature and every thought in our heads... At Imperial College London, Jon Marangos [Physics] and his research group are training their own flashlight, which currently delivers pulses as short as 250-attoseconds, on different targets. Among other things, they plan to look at the mechanism behind radiation damage in biomolecules. Radiation damage is thought to begin when a high-energy photon knocks an electron out of a molecule, leading to a chain of events that breaks bonds, damages molecules and may lead to cancerous tissue. No one is too sure about the details of this process on the shortest time scales. 'That could have important implications for how radiation damage proceeds,' says Marangos.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128311.900-electron-cinema-the-fastest-story-ever-told.html?full=true