Until now, physicists who wanted to understand how electrons behaved at the nanoscale needed to choose between instruments which had good spatial resolution (down to tens of nanometers or below) or fast time resolution (down to picoseconds), but not both. But researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique F餩rale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed a new machine able of tracking electrons at trillionths of a second. This system can work with any semiconductor and may lead to new discoveries in physics of nanoscale phenomena.
This system took four years of development to a team led by BenoDeveaud-Pl餲an of EPFL's Laboratory of Quantum Optoelectronics (LOEQ). Here is what the researchers did.