Capturing images of fleeting events — a horse's gallop, a bullet's impact, an electron's escape — is easy if you have the right equipment. Faster camera shutters used to be enough, but recently lasers have let physicists break the femto- and attosecond barriers, compressing the temporal resolution of images down to the time it takes light to cross a hydrogen atom.

Photo: Corbis1) Galloping horse

Shooter Eadweard Muybridge, 1887

Shutter speed 6 milliseconds (6 x 10-3)

The English inventor's early high-speed shutters, powered by rubber bands, were tripped when a cart rolled over wires laid in its path. As two plates slid past each other, holes drilled in their centers briefly aligned, letting light into the camera. By the 1880s, electromagnets and dry chemical plates allowed exposures of just thousandths of a second.

Photo: Harold & Esther Edgerton Foundation, 2008, Courtesy of Palm Press, Inc.2) Bullet impact

Shooter Harold "Doc" Edgerton, 1964

Shutter speed 1 microsecond (1 x 10-6)

To capture a bullet erupting from its target, Edgerton developed a technique in the 1930s that dispensed with mechanical shutters entirely. He kept the target in the dark until the firing of a rifle activated an extremely brief strobe. His images, like the ubiquitous crown-shaped splash of a milk droplet, are now sold as poster art, and his method is still used.

3) Nuclear blast

Shooter Edgerton, 1952

Shutter speed 10 nanoseconds (10 x 10-9)

To give the Atomic Energy Commission a peek at a nuke blast's early stages (in this case a 200-foot fireball), Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera. Polarizing filters on either side of a Kerr cell block all light until an electrical pulse passes through its liquid center, changing the polarity of the incoming light and exposing the film.

Photo: Christoph T. Hebeisen4) Element Melting

Shooter R. J. Dwayne Miller, 2007

Shutter speed 300 femtoseconds (300 x 10-15)

By the 1980s, lasers could deliver bursts of light faster than a single molecular vibration. A "pump" pulse triggers a reaction, and a "probe" pulse follows, acting like a strobe. Miller, a University of Toronto chemist, melted aluminum with a laser and used an electron pulse to catch the action at a molecular level. Now he's working on silicon.

5) Electron drift

Shooter Ferenc Krausz, 2007

Shutter speed 110 attoseconds (110 x 10-18)

The pump-probe technique has been modified to pare pulse times to attoseconds by using photons emitted when electrons get excited out of their orbit and crash back in. That's short enough to measure the movement of other electrons as they enter an extreme UV wave. The pairs of dotted lines span the time between two electron crossings.

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