Trillionth-of-a-Second Shutter Speed Camera Catches Chaos in Action

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around four-thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you'd need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with 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.

The new super-speedy shutter speed system gives us much more insight into what's happening with the dynamic disorder. 

The researchers are referring to their invention as variable shutter atomic pair distribution function or vsPDF for short.

"It's only with this new vsPDF tool that we can really see this side of materials," says materials scientist Simon Billinge from Columbia University in New York.

"With this technique, we'll be able to watch a material and see which atoms are in the dance and which are sitting it out."

Ref: Journal Nature Materials, ScienceAlert