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negativefactor writes:

The Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a new very high speed electron camera. The ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) instrument, which has been in development for over a decade, is capable of generating a frame every 100 femtoseconds, which researchers hope to increase 1,000 fold in the future. Using the UED, researchers are able to increase their signal to noise ratio over XRAY cameras which allow atomic nuclei to be observed in addition to electrons of the object. This video (YouTube) explains the technology in a very easy to understand way.

From the article on the SLAC website:

"A new scientific instrument at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory promises to capture some of nature's speediest processes. It uses a method known as ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) and can reveal motions of electrons and atomic nuclei within molecules that take place in less than a tenth of a trillionth of a second – information that will benefit groundbreaking research in materials science, chemistry and biology.

"We've built one of the world's best UED systems to create new research opportunities in ultrafast science," says SLAC's Xijie Wang, who is in charge of developing the new instrument described in a paper published July 24 in Review of Scientific Instruments. "Our apparatus delivers electron beams with a better quality than any other UED machine. For example, it allows us to study chemical processes in the gas phase that are up to four times faster than those we can examine with current UED technologies."

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