Slashdot Mirror
New Sensor Technology Looks at Molecular 'Fingerprint'
New sensor technology developed by engineers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory can now detect chemical, biological, nuclear, and explosive materials much more quickly and efficiently. From the article: "The millimeter/terahertz technology detects the energy levels of a molecule as it rotates. The frequency distribution of this energy provides a unique and reproducible spectral pattern - its 'fingerprint' - that identifies the material. The technology can also be used in its imaging modality - ranging from concealed weapons to medical applications such as tumor detection."
I wonder if this technology is similar to what (might) be being used here:
Mystery Robot
From TFA:
"We can use this technology to detect chemical and biological agents and also to determine if a country is using its nuclear reactors to produce material for nuclear weapons or to track the direction of a chemical or radioactive plume to evacuate an area," explained Paul Raptis, section manager. Raptis is developing these sensors with Argonne engineers Sami Gopalsami, Sasan Bakhtiari and Hual-Te Chien.
It seems as if this is good news, the ability to decide if they really are WMD's or just a new fuel source for some 3rd world country that he had no reason to invade. Perhaps this can be tested with the Iranian issues of today.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I was under the impression that properly functioning nuclear power plants shouldn't be releasing any kind of radiation into the air while operating, let alone enough radiocative plumes detectable from 9 km away. Then again, it is a Russian nuclear power plant, and Russians seem to have a much more relaxed attitude about that kind of thing.
The passive sensing is also not new. You can find journal articles about it going back at least 3-4 years; I don't have any off hand, but if you have access to a scientific journal database you can probably find them pretty quickly.
I don't recall the sensitivity of the technique given in the other articles that are out there, but then there isn't any hard data on sensitivity in this "article" either; just a reference to getting within 10 ppm in one particular test. Since they don't give the concentration of what they were measuring, this is of little value. 10 ppm error in something with parts-per-thousand concentration is pretty good. In something with parts-per-billion concentration, it's pretty bad. The information that they give in meaningless without knowing the circumstances of the test.
They have created the radar equivalent of the widely used IR spectroscopy. There is a technique for an isolated, single sample - IR spectroscopy - which requires you to dissolve the sample in a solvent and place it on a salt crystal. The new technology gives this literally new dimensions - two, as you can see should you RTFA, by using terahertz frequencies. Terahertz frequencies are difficult to generate experimentally and their behavior is largely unknown to science, unlike IR (can be created by a lamp) or radio (can be created by an oscillator). This application is truly revolutionary.
This invention is comparable to MRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), which is tomography with NMR, which also was a "dissolved sample only" kind of spectroscopy. Introducting gradients to the field allowed you to locate the resonating nuclei in two dimensions, enabling tomography in three dimensions.
Expect a Nobel Prize in physics for this.