Arthur Niedermayr

Vanadium oxide is a material that can act as an insulator, not conducting electricity, or as a conductor, like a metal. The switch takes trillionths of a second, and that's what makes it a candidate for ultrafast electronic devices. But exactly how it happens has long been a mystery.

The camera captures not a race but a dance of atoms. In vanadium dioxide, the transition from an insulating to a metallic state occurs within trillionths of a second, yet until now no one had seen exactly how the vanadium and oxygen atoms move. Now, ultrafast electron diffraction has captured this route frame by frame.