Nature publication
Discovered that it is possible to control the behaviour of matter at the atomic level using properly carved light in the extreme ultraviolet.
Giulio Cerullo, professor at the Politecnico di Milano, and Cristian Manzoni, researcher at CNR IFN, together with an international group of scientists, discovered that it is possible to control the behaviour of matter at the atomic level using properly carved light in the extreme ultraviolet.
The experiment, which has just been published in the prestigious journal Nature, shows that with light it is possible to control the quantum states of matter on ultrafast time scales and with extreme detail on its chemical properties.
The technique was applied to helium atoms, in which it was possible to manipulate the position of the energy levels of electrons and measure their motion. We can therefore use light to control the evolution of chemical reactions and direct them towards desired chemical products.