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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

New Smallest Time Measurement: How Long It Takes a Photon to Cross a Hydrogen Molecule [interestingengineering.com]

[Atomic] physicists at Goethe University led by Professor Reinhard Dörner have calculated [uni-frankfurt.de] a process that is shorter than femtoseconds for the first time ever: the measurement of how long it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule.

This is the shortest timespan that has ever been measured and amounts to about 247 zeptoseconds (a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or 10^-21 seconds). To achieve this, the scientists irradiated a hydrogen molecule with X-rays [interestingengineering.com] from the X-ray laser source PETRA III at the Hamburg accelerator facility DESY. They set it up so that one photon was sufficient to eject both electrons out of the hydrogen molecule.

The scientists then calculated the interference pattern of the first ejected electron [interestingengineering.com] using the COLTRIMS reaction microscope. This apparatus was developed partially by Dörner and it makes the super speedy reaction processes in atoms and molecules visible.

Zeptosecond birth time delay in molecular photoionization [sciencemag.org] (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb9318) (DX [doi.org])

Original Submission