(SCIENCE ALERT) – To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four-thousandths of a second. To snapshot atomic activity, you'd need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.
With that in mind, scientists have unveiled a way of achieving a shutter speed that's a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.
Simply put, it's when clusters of atoms move and dance around in a material in specific ways over a certain period – triggered by a vibration or a temperature change, for example. It's not a phenomenon that we fully understand yet, but it's crucial to the properties and reactions of materials.
