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Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured - Live Science
Oct 17, 2020 1 min, 4 secs

Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule. .

That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds.

Previously, researchers had dipped into the realm of zeptoseconds; in 2016, researchers reporting in the journal Nature Physics used lasers to measure time in increments down to 850 zeptoseconds.

It takes femtoseconds for chemical bonds to break and form, but it takes zeptoseconds for light to travel across a single hydrogen molecule (H2).

The researchers set the energy of the X-rays so that a single photon, or particle of light, knocked the two electrons out of the hydrogen molecule.

"Since we knew the spatial orientation of the hydrogen molecule, we used the interference of the two electron waves to precisely calculate when the photon reached the first and when it reached the second hydrogen atom," Sven Grundmann, a study coauthor at the University of Rostock in Germany, said in a statement.

Two hundred and forty-seven zeptoseconds, with some wiggle room depending on the distance between the hydrogen atoms within the molecule at the precise moment the photon winged by.

"We observed for the first time that the electron shell in a molecule does not react to light everywhere at the same time," Dörner said in the statement

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