The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Sunday unveiled a plan to develop an advanced attosecond laser facility, which allows researchers to observe and control processes that occur at the atomic and subatomic levels, at a conference in Xi'an City of northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
Attosecond is the shortest unit of time that human beings have been able to master so far. An attosecond is a flash of light which is 0.000000000000000001 of a second. Attosecond lasers can be used to detect electron movements inside molecules that were previously difficult to see.
The development of the advanced attosecond laser facility will be undertaken by the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in five years. Once completed, this comprehensive ultrafast electron dynamics research facility will combine attosecond lasers with their ultrashort pulse width and high spatial resolution to go deep into a series of major scientific issues in basic research.
"The large-scale attosecond scientific facility is of great significance to basic research. For example, it is highly significant to research at the electronic level, including the mechanism for electron pairing in high-temperature superconductivity, solution of the bottleneck problems in traditional computation, the ultimate efficiency of photovoltaic conversion efficacy, and so on," said Zhao Wei, a principal scientist with the institute.
At the conference, a blue paper on cutting-edge photonic technology was released. It says global photonic technology research keeps growing steadily and has multidisciplinary characteristics. It plays an increasingly important role in artificial intelligence. They are driving new progress in photonic computing and information processing technologies.
"We've also found out that photonics is a very multidisciplinary field and is broadly used in medicine, computer science, and other fields with very extensive interdisciplinary integration. Such deep interdisciplinary integration has in turn promoted our unremitting innovation and application in the field of photonics," said Wu Dengsheng, a distinguished professor of Shenzhen University.
China unveils plan to develop advanced attosecond laser facility
