In a 1988 issue of the journal Science, Ahmed Hassan Zewail published an article using this term for the first time, stating "Real-time femtochemistry, that is, chemistry on the femtosecond timescale...".
[1] Later in 1999, Zewail received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in this field showing that it is possible to see how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction with flashes of laser light.
[2] Application of femtochemistry in biological studies has also helped to elucidate the conformational dynamics of stem-loop RNA structures.
[3][4] Many publications have discussed the possibility of controlling chemical reactions by this method,[clarification needed] but this remains controversial.
In this method, two or more optical pulses with variable time delay between them are used to investigate the processes happening during a chemical reaction.