Femtosecond phase inversion?

[ReverendCounter]

Does anyone know if any experiments have taken place which involve manipulating the phase of an electromagnetic charge at the femtosecond sort of rate? There's no real basis for asking, just interested.

[Zad]

Charge is a scalar so can't have phase. Do you mean polarity? Off the top of my head the reciprocal of a femto second is going to be somewhere around that of UV light, way above microwave frequencies.

[Catatafish]

Not quite what you were after but researchers are beginning to probe things at femtosecond timescales:

European XFEL

[ReverendCounter]

Zad said:

Charge is a scalar so can't have phase. Do you mean polarity? Off the top of my head the reciprocal of a femto second is going to be somewhere around that of UV light, way above microwave frequencies.

Yep Zad, meant polarity as you pointed out, thanks for the clarification (although even the use of reciprocal is a step outside of my comfort zone!).

[ReverendCounter]

Catatafish said:

Not quite what you were after but researchers are beginning to probe things at femtosecond timescales:

European XFEL

I've looked at a few sentences here and there in the odd paper/article regarding femtosecond-scale manipulation, etc but as I'm not using the correct terminology to start with, it doesn't really help - never mind how completely unfathomable (yert stupefyingly impressive) all of this research is!

[ReverendCounter]

Perhaps a better approach would be to ask, do virtual/software research environments exist whereby a multitude of parameters/variables have been coded so that manipulating them in various ways could be estimated, or rejected if the envelope was too extreme, if you'll forgive the terminology?

As in, could item A, made from these materials, be made to respond to specific voltages B, with polarity B being effected by variable C, at amplitude D?

[Zad]

You'd be looking at very specialised modelling software - at these scales it is a physics problem rather than an engineering one, and you would need to constrain your scenario very tightly. You'd need to ask someone like the Department of Terahertz Electronics and Photonics at Leeds Uni.

Things modelled at a macroscopic level fail pretty quickly as you dial up the parameters. All models are abstractions, that is to say they lose some detail and are an approximation of the way something behaves, and as such they will have parameters outside which the model starts to become invalid. For example, Newtons laws seem universal, but push a system towards the speed of light and you need a different, or at least a more detailed model.

[ReverendCounter]

Zad, your suggestions and insight are welcomed, thank you. One final question if I may - are you aware if there is a searchable database (similar to Espacenet for patents, for example) which enables scientific research/papers to be accessed, by any chance?