For the First Time, Scientists Watch Electrons Move in Real Time | Popular Science

For the First Time, Scientists Watch Electrons Move in Real Time | Popular Science: "The team used lasers that can work in the 100-attosecond time scale -- an attosecond is 10^-18seconds, a quintillionth of a second. They measured the movement of valence electrons in a form of ionized krypton that had one electron removed.

Berkeley Lab's news site provides some in-depth descriptions, but basically what happened is that scientists measured the continued flopping of electrons between two quantum states. These valence shell oscillations cycled in a little over six femtoseconds. Using much faster attosecond laser pulses, the team was able to essentially capture this oscillation in action. The work is reported in this week's edition of the journal Nature."