Exploration of extremely short times in nuclear physics

Lifetime measurements are crucial for our understanding of the dynamics of reaction processes. Nuclear reactions often occur too rapidly for direct measurements of the times involved. Here we describe a newly developed and actively used method for studying decay processes for very hot nuclei (e.g., with temperatures of ≳1010 K or ≳2 MeV) and in particular the associated time scales of ≊10−20–10−22 s (or ≊3000–30 fm/c).