In a team effort involving several research groups, we have successfully pushed the temporal resolution of lightwave-driven scanning tunneling microscopy into the attosecond regime. This allows us to reach the quantum-mechanical space-time limit in ultrafast real-space microscopy, for the first time.

Upon excitation with single-cycle near-infrared waveforms, the electrons in the STM tip acquire energy which is accompanied by a loss of localization of the wavefunction – a process that can be directly imaged in the microscope. Yet with optimal settings, our newly developed microscope maintains atomic spatial resolution, allowing us to investigate ultrafast electron dynamics with atomic-scale precision.

In the future, we aim to use electron wave packets to selectively trigger chemical reactions and to observe, on their natural length and time scales, how chemical bonds are broken and rearranged. In the long term, the insights gained could also contribute to driving electronic and quantum information devices at the intrinsic speed limit of electron motion itself.

The results were published in Nature Photonics (external link, opens in a new window)

The results were also featured in a video on YouTube (external link, opens in a new window). (See also Press Echo)