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
  • For reference, one femtosecond is equal to one millionth of a billionth of a second.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 21 Jan. 2026
  • That was when scientists only had femtosecond-length laser pulses.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 3 Feb. 2016
  • 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
  • On the cold side, the team again used femtosecond laser pulses—this time on aluminum—to produce a highly effective heat sink.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 13 Aug. 2025
  • For many years light pulses were stuck in the femtosecond regime (one femtosecond is 1000 attoseconds).
    — Daniel Garisto, Scientific American, 3 Oct. 2023
  • The new prototype, still very far from being practical, took femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) to charge and stored the energy for nanoseconds.
    — New Atlas, 4 Apr. 2026
  • These emit incredibly precise light pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds or quadrillionths of a second.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 3 June 2026
  • Instead of using magnets or chemicals that can fade, a very fast laser (called a femtosecond laser) is used to create tiny, permanent marks deep inside the glass.
    — New Atlas, 21 Feb. 2026
  • To shatter those barriers, the collaboration turned to extreme speed and used femtosecond lasers.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2026
  • Short-pulse lasers fire bursts lasting femtoseconds — quadrillionths of a second — packing huge energy into extremely tight time windows.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 6 Nov. 2025
  • 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
  • The double excited state decays by electron emission after a few femtoseconds, producing a higher charge state.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 28 Nov. 2025
  • The researchers shone infrared laser pulses 250 femtoseconds long on top of the channel to help accelerate electrons down it.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Researchers suspend microscopic particles in a fluid and focus a femtosecond laser on a precise point.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 29 Jan. 2026
  • Black cautions there remain questions about how feasible this strategy can prove at scale, as femtosecond lasers are currently expensive.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 18 Feb. 2026
  • The process begins with a femtosecond laser cutting GaN dielets from a wafer and drilling precise cavities into the diamond substrate.
    — Atharva Gosavi, Interesting Engineering, 8 June 2026
  • To the extreme This new machine, however, reportedly uses a femtosecond laser to fire into argon gas.
    — Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 22 Nov. 2025
  • 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
  • However, this deformation, which was once impossible to detect, has now been captured with the help of femtosecond-scale X-ray pulses.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 19 Aug. 2025
  • For years, this ultrafast breakdown happening within just one to two femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) has been one of physics’ most stubborn blind spots.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 5 Apr. 2026
  • By reducing those cooling times, ICFO has brought speeds down from picoseconds to femtoseconds.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 28 Dec. 2017
  • This brief interval only lasts only a few femtoseconds, which is approximately one quadrillionth of a second, and can lead to the formation of a rare doubly excited state.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 28 Nov. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • In a study, Microsoft scientists sought to overcome those deficiencies by using femtosecond lasers, which fire high-power laser pulses just quadrillionths of a second long.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 18 Feb. 2026
  • 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
  • As normal energy barriers usually block hopfions from forming, the team used ultra-fast femtosecond laser pulses to shock the spin system out of equilibrium.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2026
  • 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

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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