Slashdot Mirror
Fastest Waves Ever Photographed
starfoot writes, "Pictures of the fastest waves ever photographed, traveling at 99.997% of the speed of light, were presented today at the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting in Philadelphia. The waves were formed in the wake of an intense laser pulse passing through a plasma of electrons and ionized atoms. The waves create enormous electric fields (over 100 billion electron volts/meter), which can be used to rapidly accelerate charged particles to high energies in the span of a few meters. The pictures will help scientists better understand wakefield interactions — an important factor in their quest to replace machines that accelerate particles over the course of miles with compact, tabletop versions. High energy particle accelerators are vital for cutting edge physics and many types of medical therapy, and miniaturizing them would be a boon for both basic physics research and medicine."
I bet it was just photoshopped. Gimme ten minutes, and I can give you a wave doing 99.999% of the speed of light.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
do they run Linux?
sorry.
Beware of the Leopard.
Thats hot.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
They run from all operating systems.
My Sysadmin Blog
Managment won't care until they get to 99.999%.
Dead serious, I know there's a difference here between my family photo album and the pretty graph thing FTFA, could someone explain to me why photographing LIGHT doesn't count here?
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
You must be new here!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
The electric field is merely the negative gradient of the scalar potential (ie, voltage)*. So in SI it will have units of Volts/Meter.
* (Just in case any E&M sticklers want to point that my electric field definition here ignores the contribution from vector potential, just assume a time-independent gauge).
make world, not war
You're right - an eV is a unit of energy. It's the charge of an electron multiplied by a volt - in other words, it's the energy gained by an electron accelerated through a one volt potential.
However, somewhat confusingly, it's also often used as a unit of mass - technically the units are eV/c^2, but in the particle physics grand tradition of insanely terse notation, the c^2 is usually dropped and eV is used as a unit of mass.
If you made instant coffee in the microwave, would you go back in time?
let me guess, you refresh slashdot at relativistic speeds.
There's currently no way to take a snapshot of a single photon in motion and produce an image out of it. An ordinary photograph captures the effect of many millions of them impacting a chemical, so that's not really the same
Hubble telescope pictures consist of photographing waves travelling at 100% of the speed of light in vacuum by definition!
For the pedants technically your own photographs generally don't count because the refractive index of air (1.0008) actually means that light waves in air will only travel at 99.92% of the speed of light in vacuum.
Wow man......surf's up, man. Fast waves? I'm in! Time to hit the beach!
The reason this is so awesome is that scientists can apply this to nanotechnology -- actually, the prefix "nano" is not small enough. After all, everything moves in waves, but these waves are only noticeable on a small enough scale. On this scale, electric energy is so much more important than gravity. The fact that this energy is electric and not physical means that, instead of bumping atoms around continuous for a month, something might happen sooner. The fact that it's been proven done might help with something, like (for example) supplying a power source. The question is, "How easy is it to synthesize this phenomenon, and is it worth it?"
What excites me most is the fact that Are we still afraid of put explosives into our chemistry kits for fear that kids might get hurt? Just like how, around Sputnik time, the US gov't tried to make all of the children in its public education system little scientists of future, it is (seriously) important to get kids interested in science, math, and academic pursuit at a young age. Can a little kid read the KJ version of the Bible at 4 years old, as was done in days of yore?
It would be a good thing that, with this increased technology, scientists would try to give nuclear chemistry to the public and make atomic physics more tangible. There was an ambitious project some time ago that wanted to create a huge electromagnetic field somewhere in Texas. It was shut down because the US gov't saw no use of it. If this technology can do something as simple as power a light bulb, the public will notice. No one cares if Element 118 is created in a matter of seconds instead of across the span of a week, but if people can actually see something, this is better for science in general. (So long as John Galt doesn't get angry.)
And in the realm of plasma physics, the eV is a common surrogate for temperature, in which Boltzmann's constant k is omitted. It's always fun when you have multiple definitions for the same abbreviation in exciting, but overlapping, branches of physics! Since I was at this talk early this morning, it certainly was exciting to see the progress in this field.
Thats almost as fast as MS new security breaches!
When can I go for a ride in the particle accelerator?
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
That laser was burning at a full 30 terawatts. Fit THAT on a desktop. Please.
Yeah, dammit, I was hoping to see someone surfing these waves!
Jiggly watts to warp speed - anyone know the conversion?
I thought it was a good idea
"I don't see the added benefit of studying such interactions and building particle accelerators which cost a bomb, or miniaturizing them, which would cost even bigger a bomb."
A "usability engineer" can't see the point and has the costing wrong, what a surprise!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
o/
/|
/ \
This is me waving so fast my arm looks stationary
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
many types of medical therapy
Hey, so I understand the applications in Physics of desktop particle accelerators, but what kinds of medical therapy use particle accelerators? Wikipedia suggests creating rare "proton-heavy" isotopes, but I'm having trouble finding more about what kinds of "killer apps" (pun intended) would be enabled if there were cheap desktop particle accelerators. Someone in med school?
Electron Volts per Meter (eV/m) is actually a perfectly valid measure of electric field. It's how much energy an electron going through the field would gain per meter. To get the actual electric field, you would just divide by the elementary charge e = 1.6*10^-19 C. In relativity and particle physics, one often sees masses expressed in eV/c^2 and momenta in eV/c. It's just a convenient notation to absorb unweildy constants such as e and c, and show the numbers that really matter.
Yes, what possible benefits could there be to machines that help probe the basic nature of matter?
The CRT didn't have much relevance to everyday life in 1897 either, nor did that first bigass transistor from Bell Labs. If it weren't for money that was spent on pie-in-the-sky / "basic" research, there'd be nothing to do applied research on.
I'm a bit of a laymen, the huge stadium sized accelerator uses some kind of giant magnetic field to propel a particle and split atoms at the other end right?
:)
Why do we do this again? Just to detect the junk that's emitted from the destroyed atom? Why do hospitals need a tabletop accelerator?
Thanks for filling me in
Surely we could hook up half a dozen of theses accelerator things to the bottom of a round ... er ... 'UFO like' structure and really get some movement going.
My dad pratically fell on top of a tiger shark when we were out fishing once, and the waves were, well, nevermind.
I never get a chance to work that story into anything...
Positron Emmision Tomography. AKA a PET scan. It's like an MRI on steroids. Helps them find all sorts of broken/excess bits in that big bag o' meat called a patient. The things are really useful, really really big, and really really really expensive. Make them smaller and, well, they'll be smaller, probably still really really expensive. This is the health care industry we're talking about.
Now, to create the world's fastest surfboard :-)
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
I measured these but I can't make up my mind if they're a particle or a wave.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Officials from Taco Bell were unavailable for comment.
Hospitals use accelerators to make various isotopes, that are then injected and imaged.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
...enormous electric fields (over 100 billion electron volts/meter)...
I think normal matter like the iron my Toyota is made from has the same field strenght near the nucleus. Anything less, and the car would fall apart. Not sure what is so enourmous about it.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
+-----------+
| _ 5MPH__ |
| No Wake_|
+----+-----+
|
|
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The harbor master isn't going to like this one.
--
BMO
A few thousand of these running in parallel may offer methods for creating meaningful amounts of antimatter.
You kids and your new-fangled sub-light speed waves.
Get offa my lawn!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have be capturing light waves at 100% for years with my digi cam.
``Pictures of the fastest waves ever photographed, traveling at 99.997% of the speed of light ...''
Rafting is recommended to experienced rafters only.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The light in photographs is (usually) the average power falling on an element, be it a CCD chip or a piece of silver halide salt in emulsion which interacts with the incident radiation over the timescale of many wavelengths. What these researchers are doing is "photographing" the individual wavefronts of a matter wave, rather than just the intensity information. Spatially resolving the so-called phase information of such a wave is no mean feat and is an area of current research in optics. Wakefields are a very cool plasma phenomenon in themselves, propagating with velocity near vacuum light speed in a medium. As user Gracenotes pointed out, the applications of wakefields can, due their very high electric fields, have potential for particle acceleration experiments. Especially so in hospitals where creating short-lived isotopes for procedures like positron emission tomography are desirable in ever smaller and ever more efficient machines. And don't get me started on a 30 TW laser. Frickin huge.....
Nope. Electron-volt is a measure of energy.
Volts have dimension of: m^2*s^-3*kg*A^-1
Electron-volts have dimension: kg*m^2*S^-2
Pfft. I've got tons of pictures of light waves traveling at 100% the speed of light.
What might I want to do with a tabletop particle accelerator?
Also, the speed of light in air is probably a bit less than that of the speed of light in a vacuum ("the Speed of Light", c, ~3e8 m/sec).
finally ghostbuster technology for the masses
If you type "10^11 eV / meter in lb" into a google box, you get (10^11) (eV / meter) = 3.60183597 × 10^-9 pound force
In negative refractive index ("left-handed") materials, the effective speed of light is greater than the speed of light in a vacuum (don't ask me how). So you can go faster even than that.
Haven't you people ever watched Ghostbusters?
-x- Sorry my bad English. I'll have him tarred and feathered. -x-
The error originally came from the article itself. If you RTA now it says electron volts with a score through electron, so obviously someone on the publishing side had much the same problem.
High energy particle accelerators are vital for cutting edge physics and many types of medical therapy, and miniaturizing them would be a boon for both basic physics research and medicine.
What? No mention of use as weapons?
But back towards the topic, the *really* cool (and certainly more evil sounding) physics won't begin to emerge until the development of exawatt lasers. At this point it may be possible to literally BOIL the vacuum with light. I don't know if this would enable you to break a hole into a hell dimension, but it certainly sounds plausible, doesn't it? Someone should alert Michael Crichton!
The parent did not suggest measuring the electric field in joules per meter instead of electron volts per meter. It suggested measuring the electric field in volts per meter instead of electron volts per meter. Which makes sense.
The point is that these wakefield-accelerator designers are interested in the energy that they can impart onto an electron, normalized by the interaction length. To that end, electron volts per meter are a perfectly reasonable unit to use. The Slashdot blurb is not the only case of this--if you read the abstract for this paper or any of the other wakefield accelerator abstracts for the 48th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics, you see them using units of electron volts per meter. I agree that it's sloppy dimensional analysis, but I understand why those units are convenient in that specific discipline.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
http://www.aps.org/meet/DPP06/baps/loader.cfm?url= /commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=78234
I don't know if this would enable you to break a hole into a hell dimension, but it certainly sounds plausible,
Uh oh.... I smell a DOOM sequel...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Electron volt is a ùass unit. An electric field is measured in volt/meter. That "electron" word has to be a typo from someone with a very limited understanding of physics.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
> wakefield interactions
When I was 25, I had a wonderful Wakefield, MA, interaction with a 32 year old blonde, big-lipped divorcee. She was even named "Debbie".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I had an AVM "operated" on by one of these partical accelerators two years ago. It was so deep in my brain that there was no way traditional surgical procedures could be used, and it would have eventually killed me. But by strapping me into the particle accelerator the surgeons were able to seal the AVM and stop blood leaking into my brain.
The only downside is it takes a lot longer to get drunk now since blood doesn't leak directly into my brain anymore...
Anyway, just a personal view of how these technologies can help.
Ok, where are the photos?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Could we set these devices to stun? That'd be a "killer app", no? Vince
I want me one of those tabletop accelerators for my shop, oh and a tabletop nuclear fusion reactor would be nice too.
LASERGUNPEWPEWPEW
Ok, ok, but in all seriousness: if this will allow for particle accelerator research in a compact and affordable package, what would a particle accelerator, built on the scale of CERN but with this technology, be able to do?
The blogger is about as knowledgeable about particle accelerator design as the average Slashdotter. :-p Interestingly enough, no one at the American Physical Society's 48th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics seems to have issues with the use of the units "electron volts per meter".
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
The waves create enormous electric fields (over 100 billion electron volts/meter).
Could these (i assume) elertrons/electric charges be harnessed in some way?
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how particle accelators are used in medine? It sounds interesting.
quia potentia mens mentis
It's often very convenient to measure in eV/m, just because if you're dealing with electrons/protons and many other fundamental particles which all have charges that are multiples of e, you don't have to carry along that constant wherever you go - it's simply understood. Sometimes you're just interested in momentum or energy or speed - and even though their units are properly [kg][m][s] and so on, it's more convenient in eV/c, eV and /c.
Indeed, the purpose with the choice of units is to relate the field strength to the energies to which a unit length of the field can accelerate an electron/proton. But what physicist cannot immediately see what energy this is (in electron volts) if the field strength is given in volts per meter? How is measuring an electric field strength in any way easier to do with eV/m when V/m gives the exact same numerical value and is also dimensionally correct?