News Physics

The world’s fastest microscope makes its debut

The microscope can snap images every few hundred quintillionths of a second

This illustration of a sheet of graphene shows a grid of connected atoms with a red streak going diagonally across it.

A new type of microscope used a laser and an electron beam to snap images of electrons moving within a sheet of graphene (illustrated) at a record pace of one every 625 attoseconds.

AlexanderAlUS/Wikimedia Commons, T. Tibbitts

By Skyler Ware

The motion of whizzing electrons has been captured like never before.

Researchers have developed a laser-based microscope that snaps images at attosecond — or a billionth of a billionth of a second — speed.