How to Use femtosecond in a Sentence
femtosecond
noun-
One femtosecond is one-quadrillionth of a second—that’s one millionth of one billionth of a second!
—Kat Friedrich, Popular Mechanics, 14 June 2023
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The medium in question is a block of high-purity glass, which has voxels etched into it with femtosecond lasers.
—Jim Salter, Ars Technica, 7 Nov. 2019
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For context, 1 terawatt is 1 trillion watts, while 1 femtosecond is the equivalent of 1 quadrillionth of a second.
—Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 24 Feb. 2021
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Tuned to pick up near-infrared light and completing a scan in a few femtoseconds (10–15 seconds), the loop would see the vacuum glowing like a gas at room temperature.
—Quanta Magazine, 19 Jan. 2016
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Zewail, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his research, measured these miniscule changes in femtoseconds; a femtosecond is one millionth of a billionth of a second.
—NBC News, 19 Oct. 2020
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Zewail, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his research, measured these miniscule changes in femtoseconds; a femtosecond is one millionth of a billionth of a second.
—NBC News, 19 Oct. 2020
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Within 30 femtoseconds – millionths of a billionth of a second – the molecule lost more than 50 electrons, far more than expected.
—Fox News, 5 June 2017
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One evening while working in the lab, Du accidentally lifted his goggles while aligning the mirrors of a femtosecond laser, then a very new type of laser that emitted an extremely short pulse of light.
—Katie Hunt, CNN, 14 Sep. 2022
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Developed during the 1990s, the technique uses ultra-short laser pulses—a femtosecond is one-millionth of a billionth of a second—which produces no heat to cut into a surface of an object.
—Bryan Hood, Robb Report, 23 Nov. 2021
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The problem was fundamental: even the briefest physically achievable optical laser pulse was a few femtoseconds in length.
—Daniel Garisto, Scientific American, 3 Oct. 2023
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Other light sources like synchrotrons can certainly generate X-rays, but X-ray free-electron lasers have the advantage of creating very bright, very fast X-ray bursts, on the order of femtoseconds.
—IEEE Spectrum, 26 Sep. 2023
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For this solar purifier, the scientists treated aluminum sheeting using a treatment of femtosecond-long—a quadrillionth of a second—laser pulses.
—Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 15 July 2020
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This requires that all possible states of the traveling particle be superposed in a single, coherent quantum state for tens of femtoseconds.
—Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2013
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An encounter of a PBH with a human body would represent a collision of an invisible relic from the first femtosecond after the big bang with an intelligent body—a pinnacle of complex chemistry made 13.8 billion years later.
—Avi Loeb, Scientific American, 6 June 2021
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Ochiai’s setup, nicknamed Fairy Lights, employs much shorter femtosecond laser pulses that are much less dangerous despite having a high peak intensity, Ochiai says.
—Mark Aramo, Discover Magazine, 11 Apr. 2022
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Ultrashort lasers produce pulses with a duration measured in femtoseconds (a femtosecond is 10-15 or a million-billionth of a second), and while their overall energy may be small, the power level for that brief duration is extremely high.
—David Hambling, Forbes, 11 Mar. 2021
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Computational approaches to protein structure focused on cunning algorithms, rather than on attempting to track atoms femtosecond by femtosecond.
—Oliver Morton, WIRED, 1 July 2001
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Measuring them requires equipment capable of discriminating between femtoseconds.
—The Economist, 16 June 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'femtosecond.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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