Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Aluminum Is "New State of Matter"
Professor_Quail writes with this interesting excerpt: "Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world's most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminum' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion."
This is a great breakthrough. This means that we can now wear full face tinfoil hats for even more protection without risking to bump into something anymore. Thanks that tinfoil hats are actually made of aluminum nowadays ! ;-))
Imagine the progress for this brave user:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JVVaXmiE24g/RuYklvXfUqI/AAAAAAAAFDo/ES8XpC4bcbg/s400/tinfoil2.bmp
Tinfoil hats are made of aluminum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Tag this 'transparisteel'
I just can't see it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
If I got TFA right, it's only transparent to ultraviolets, through a tiny hole, and for a few femtoseconds. I'm sure it's great news but it's a bit over my head, and it's definitely nothing as cool as I was picturing.
You just got troll'd!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
Thats a whale of a claim.
All the benifits of aluminum paper and saran wrap combined together for all my food needs! Marvelous! Is it eatable and delicious too? Think about never having to unwrap a sandwich again!
Not to diminish their accomplishments, but from TFA:
This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
So this doesn't quite have as broad a nerd appeal as the summary would lead us to believe.
Nothing in the article makes it sound very transparent in the way we'd imagine transparency. Extreme ultra-violet? Maybe, but it sure looks from the image like that transparent aluminium is at best translucent for visible spectrum light -- look at how much that laser is diffused.
It's been a long time.
with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.
And don't forget about the possibilities this will open up in terms of fashion for the foil hat crowd.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sapphire glass has been common place for many decades. It is by weight a little more than half Aluminum and very transparent.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Only at certain UV spectrum, according to the article.
It notes "core electrons" have been knocked out. I assume it's certain non-valent inner electron? Any one(s) in particular?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Since the researchers are at Oxford, shouldn't the new material be "Aluminium"?
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Have you wondered if that soda can over there is empty or full?
world's most powerful soft X-ray laser.
Really, unless you're talking about bathroom tissue, you really shouldn't use the term "World's most powerful" and "Soft" together.
How is this different from http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/23/1141217 ?
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
The last time I checked, the colloquail definition of "transparent" means "passes visible light".Glad to know those scientists can see in the UV range - sounds like evolution is moving apace.
How is this statement justified? So far, all I hear is "I pissed on a rock and it turned to mud - it's a new state of matter!"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Just heat aluminium to 2500+ÂC and it becomes transparent.
- Raynet --> .
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator in which the magnetic field (to turn the particles so they circulate) and the electric field (to accelerate the particles) are carefully synchronized with the travelling particle beam.
This does not mean this process can be used to make transparent armor or other applications for super-strong glass. The article states that the x-rays wereï focused to a spot with a diameter smaller than a human hair's, the aluminum was transparent to ultraviolet, and the state lasted 40 femtoseconds. Details left out of the summary.
Nonetheless, this is incredibly cool. The new state of matter that is being boasted about is one where a non-valent electron is removed from atoms. Very cool.
There has got to be a use somewhere... boots, S&M wear, something...
That the slashdot editors do not RTFA either.
Typical. ( http://www.twine.com/item/12ghl089r-cv/transparent-aluminium-is-new-state-of-matter ) Make it sound all cool for they layman, but then qualify it with "This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation. " - so, transparent - sorta. Still cool and all, but you won't be savin' no whales any time soon.
meh
Straight from star trek.
This would be amazing in military applications and other defense applications. Watching the movie The Hurt Locker last night one of the guys (in the hum-v) was manning the machine gun. The top 1/3 of his body is exposed on the top of the hum-v which makes him prime pickings for incoming fire. If I was him I would want some defensive there - even very thick plexiglass (lined with metal wires)...given that is not available, this could do the trick. It may not block everything but make it thick enough and it can block out most bullets.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
short pulse from the FLASH laser 'knocked out' a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure. This turned the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
..."Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds..."
OK. so they took a really powerful soft X-ray pulse source and hammered an electron out of most of the atoms in a sample of aluminum. In 40 femtoseconds (!) the electrons were replaced, but for a brief period, the material would pass "extreme ultraviolet radiation". This isn't a "new material"; it's an old material in a very transient state. They were able to do this without blasting the aluminum apart, which is the new result. On the other hand, metals can be forced into electron-deprived states without too much trouble. Ordinary vacuum tubes do this.
The terminology here is puzzling. "Extreme ultraviolet radiation" and "soft X-rays" are in the same part of the spectrum. Does this mean that after being zapped with the giant X-ray pulse, some of the soft X-rays made it through? Or did they have two different illumination sources?
Also see "Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation Transport in Laser-Irradiated High-Z Metal Foils", from 1981, where someone seems to have come close to the same phenomenon.
1. It's not invisible to the naked eye - only to "extreme ultraviolet radiation"
2. It's not anything like what was described in Star Trek
3. It's only "invisible" for milliseconds.
Neat stuff for physicists, but not for anyone else, at the moment, as far as I can tell.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kulakovich/2072737950/
kulakovich
This material could be used in the generation of a nearly limitless source of lens flares. An important part of the future of the star trek universe.
I don't care what it's made of. All I want to know is where this new state is located.
The only reason that the aluminum needed to be 'transparent' was so that the camera could show that 'there be whales here.' I'm sure the whales didn't care. All they got was a view of the inside of a Klingon Bird of Prey. Yay. :-|
Just wait until all the videos of people walking into plate glass get replaced by this... magnificent! In other news, a group of amazon women have requested a shipment of jet aircraft grade transparent aluminum...
First we get a story about green lasers. Then something about security problems with Flash.
And now a story about a FLASH LASER?
Is that a huge coincidence or what?
Transparant aluminum == aluminum oxynitride. Been around for decades.
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123012131
Finally under test about 4 years ago at WPAFB. Was discussing it at counter-IED deployment I did in Baghdad a couple years ago, as window armor for MRAPS, JEERVS, and HMMWVs, but the stuff is wickedly expensive.
Two different technologies to create two different materials that happen to share the same description. The 2004 story you linked to is about a product that is in production, with real world tangible benefits, and is actually transparent in the visual spectrum. The one in the current story can't claim any of that.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
i can't view the article. physorg's server is overloaded with people or it's down.
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. - Nikola Tes
If it has blue impurities, we call it a sapphire. Red impurities we call it a ruby.
Morevoer, we know how to make artificial rubies and sapphires, so this is not even the first man made transparent aluminum.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Hi,
:-).
please tell me: How many time has transparent aluminium been discovered by now?
I think about five to six times... E.g. in 2005
Please don't wake me up the next time someone discovers it
CU, Martin
First green lazer and now Transparent Aluminum. I better start building my D'deridex-class Warbird right away!
In breaking with Star Trek Canon, we discovered this before the whales went extinct.
Isn't true of every "new" material?
Oh wait, I forgot superconductivity.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do "ordinary vacuum" tubes even exist any more?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They focused light of equivalent power of a city power plant down to 1/20 the width of a hair in a pulse a femtosecond long and they are surprised the light went through their target. I'd be transparent too at that light level.
That's why Star Wars is better. Transparisteel!
Transparent aluminum. Bah! Might as well use plexiglass. That's Star Trek for you...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Sounds cool, just as long as we don't accidentally create ice-nine while making these "new states of matter".
We like to attribute scientific foresight to sci-fi. And indeed, sci-fi has been the inspiration for many a scientist or engineer. Star Trek writers probably picked aluminum because of its high strength and low density. But unless there was some kind of prior scientific advancement that they knew about, the choice of aluminum amounted to little more than a convenient plot device. It doesn't seem implausible to me that it would foreshadow the development of SOME kind of metal or other non-SiO2 material that's light, strong, and transparent. But not necessarily aluminum.
To say nothing of whale transport.
I always thought you could make any form of matter invisible by rubbing something sufficiently greasy on it.
Aluminum is a metal, alumina is a ceramic. What you are suggesting is like calling water 'oxygen'.
love is just extroverted narcissism
You can find an example of this material here
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The last time I checked, the colloquail definition of "transparent" means "passes visible light".Glad to know those scientists can see in the UV range - sounds like evolution is moving apace.
UV light borders the "visible light" spectrum (much like IR light does), and any material that blocks one of those ranges almost always blocks the others. Transparency in a normally non-transparent material in any one of these ranges is important for 3 reasons:
everytime a Mac nazi asks me for help with his Mac - i pick up the mouse and say "hello computer .... hello...."
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I'm looking forward to my transparent unibody Macbook Pro.
No, actually. If it has red impurities it's a ruby. Otherwise, no matter what the color, it's a sapphire.
Ordinary vacuum tubes do this.
Do "ordinary vacuum" tubes even exist any more?
http://www.rfparts.com/tubetran.html
Generally speaking, for RF purposes, like AM band up to high radar frequencies, at power levels above a couple hundred watts, its cheaper to use a vacuum tube than a transistor. Generally in the vaguely multi-kilowatt range, tubes cost about 50 cents per watt, transistors cost about $1 per watt.
They are quite tolerant of modest overloads.
Replacement labor costs and even device costs are simply not an issue... Consider a typical tenth megawatt class TV station, at best 25% electrical efficiency, looking at maybe 4 cents per KWH contracted electrical price, you're looking at $16000 per hour of electricity... The station engineer simply doesn't cost very much compared to the electricity.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Holy shit! This is fantastic!
I can now see what the status of my tinfoil wrapped dinner is without unwrapping it for a status check!
Hallelujah!
Dupe!
"Transparent Aluminum a Reality!"
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0337213
From Tuesday October 18 2005.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
I don't believe it until I see it.
Duh.
I just want to know if 40 femtoseconds is enough to see what's in that foil package in the refrigerator?
Man, talk about excess hype: the aluminum passes extreme UV radiation, for 40 femtoseconds. Calling this "transparent" is one of the bigger exaggerations I've heard recently.
Uh, the article discusses pure, solid aluminum, not its oxide with or without impurities.
If you are going to complain about slashdot summaries, you should strive to improve upon them. Its transparent to extreme UV for an estimated 40 femtoseconds. That is, if it was actually transparent for a year, milliseconds would have been a more appropriate unit than they are for the actual time for which it is transparent. (1 year ~= 3E10 ms, 40 fs = 4E-11 ms)
(1) Nothing in the title or summary makes any claims about what wavelength the material is transparent to.
(2) While mentioning Star Trek, also talks about the "real material" as if it were a different thing.
(3) Nothing in the title or summary makes any claims about how long the material lasts.
In short (and unlike some examples), the summary is perfectly accurate. However, the reading comprehension of a lot of /. readers is not, having a tendency to "read into" them things that aren't actually there (then blaming /. editors when the actual article doesn't say what they mistakenly read the summary as saying).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Sea World reports 2 of their whales are missing
Neat stuff for physicists, but not for anyone else, at the moment, as far as I can tell.
Aren't physicists nerds?
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I just wanted to point out that while they are not pure aluminum, Sapphire, ruby, and several other transparent or nearly transparent gem stones are crystals made up of aluminum oxide -- colors are caused by natural or synthetic doping with trace elements. Chances are, if you have an expensive analog watch, you probably have a piece of 'transparent aluminum' ensuring your time piece is readable and does not get scratched easily.
I have a real problem with getting too excited over this article, and clearly the people who did the work are playing on star trek's popularity to garner more media attention than is really warranted.
More Caffeine. NOW
ans...
Then, change the summary line "New State of FECAL Matter", after burning their asses up with that frickin' LASER....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It's really amazing the lack of curiosity, or value of scientific knowledge that is on display around here.
Anti-intellectualism is on the rise, unfortunately.
After reading that article I cared for approximately 40 femtoseconds. Wake me up when I can order this with my Macbook Pro.
I hereby claim patent pre-existing art for the following idea of transparent aluminum boats. Mostly because I want a transparent aluminum bass fishing boat. You could see what was in your live well without opening it up. You could see how much beer was left in the built in cooler. Oh and you could see a leak right away. You could see what was underneath the boat, and you could light the whole thing up with LEDs for night fishing. Now how cool would that be??
Since WonderWoman had an invisible plane, Aquaman should have had a Transparent Aluminum boat.
Good point. Mistype.
Not only does the "transparency" only last for 40 femtoseconds (!), but it's only transparent in the extreme ultraviolet. So don't go dusting off your plans for whale tanks yet.
1. No kidding. However, the transparent aluminum in Star Trek was invisible to the naked eye. Reading comprehension? Understanding implication? You fail.
2. Wrong - it says, and I quote "'Transparent aluminum' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV,". Reading comprehension? You fail.
3. Of course it does. It talks about a material that is similar, if not the same, as in Star Trek. That material didn't degrade. Reading comprehension? Understanding implication? You fail.
In short, don't be an ass - it's not worth it. Especially when it's clear to anyone who bothers to read your tripe that you are quite wrong.
Insulting me for no good reason? You fail.
bullshit. corundum is not transparent.
Aluminium oxynitride is transparent though.
I don't think anything is static. It depends on the scope one observes. Since time is the most accurately measurable dimension in the universe, we can observe a scope below fempto-seconds and on the high side, a good fraction of the estimated age of the universe.
Since proportionally, there is more time resolution than there are particles, there is a good likelyhood of more transient states occurring regularly, given the balance and diversity of forces/energy concentrations.
Things exist as a synergy of dynamic states. It is the stability of the "symbiosis", not the stability of the individual components that gives the impression of steady states. Self sustaining chain reactions are full of transient states, such as fire, fission, or fusion. Exotic transient states are totally relevant when considering the macro scale.
Yes, and perfectly misleading. The summary deliberately leaves out this relevant information to make the discovery sound more interesting than it is. It's clearly meant to sound like a real-life version of the stuff they used in the Star Trek film, when in fact, this material bears little resemblance to that. Let's not blame the Slashdot readers for being misled, when the author plainly meant to mislead them.
Air Force testing new transparent armor
"ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant, offers substantial impact resistance, and provides better durability and protection against armor piercing threats, at roughly half the weight and half the thickness of traditional glass transparent armor", said the lieutenant.
That's not transparent aluminum. That's a transparent compound of aluminum. Calling corundum "transparent aluminum" is like calling salt "edible chlorine".
Rather than go to all this expense they could just grow AL2O3 crystal and have permanent "transparent Aluminm". Some chemi-Nazi /.er will now correct me to say that Al203 is "alumina" and not aluminum, to which I will say, alumina is not alumina, but Aluminum oxide, and hence Aluminum, or we could just say white sapphire. Just like Iron oxide is considered "iron", I consider aluminum oxide "aluminum".
It's just a name, If I want to call white sapphire transparent aluminum, I will since it's nothing but aluminum molecules with a little oxygen added. Of course, it look like they're trying to do something unusual with transparent aluminum to make it transparent to certain wavelengths. Which might have some interesting real world applications. I wonder how good naturally occurring transparent aluminum, I mean white sapphire, is at being transparent to ultraviolet? I imagine the crystal matrix is quite large, but is it large enough to allow significant passage of ultra-violet? I'll bet there are other crystal structures that would fit this bill also.
The article doesn't state if this is pure aluminum or not, but seems to imply it is. In other words, the X-Ray beam is doing what the oxygen atom does in white sapphire, pulling away the outer electron. So, the interesting conclusion is that a pure Al+ crystal should be transparent, if you could make it and make it stable. Another fine example of man ALMOST re-inventing something that Nature already has done. Way to go guys!
Yes, but "extreme UV" is all the way down on the end and is ORDERS of MAGNITUDE shorter than plain old generic UV light. Holy craptastic! Talk about selective editing! Oh, wait, I'm on /.
;')
Sometimes, I forget.
Alternatively you can deprive metals of electrons for 40 femtoseconds by passing an electric current through them. So, the scientists have found a new way to make internal electric currents in metals. BRILLIANT!
So where can I get my own "most powerful X-Ray laser" so I can generate my own electricity? And when will I be able to make enough electricity to disconnect from the grid? What's the ROI? If you pass current through Aluminum blocks does that make them transparent to extreme UV, as long as the UV beam follows less than 40 femtoseconds behind the current? Enquiring minds want to know. Put it all together in a cylinder and you get a X-Ray-UV Death Gun Turret (patent pending), or XUDeGuT.
no one has posted about whales or artificial rubies~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would go so far as to say that the power requirements to bombard the surface like that make it incredibly useless to an engineer. It seems to me, culturally, that the physicists of the world are busy creating the obtuse and no engineers are busy chasing what they have done with applications. I wonder if this technology could be made to construct an invisible jet plane, such as what Wonder Woman flew. So the question I have is (to a chemical / mechanical engineer ) is any of this particle research useful, or is it just fun to read? Superconductors do not seem to be making a dent in my utility bills.
if transparent aluminum is "new", what the hell is aluminum oxynitride (AlON)?? this may be a new form of it, we've had transparent aluminum for a few years now, even if it is a ceramic.
I definitely don't know enough about particle phsyics but I assume the article meant by "core" electrons, the lowest energy level ones in the closest shell or whatever. So how would they only knock one of those out and leave the rest in higher energy levels and wouldn't one in a higher energy level just emit a photon and then drop down an energy level to replace the missing one? Isn't that basically what happens when you ionize atoms positively? Or did they literally knock off all the electrons in the higher energy levels and also ones nearest to the nucleus? Either way, the article states that it maintained its crystaline structure so it's not a new state of matter, it's still a solid. In fact, it sounds like just really, really ionized aluminum by the description. But then there's the whole "it lasted 40 femtoseconds" thing. And it only was invisible in the ultraviolet spectrum? There's a lot of weird details in that summary.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
From TFA "This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation."
Sure, what they're doing is really cool, probing new areas of solid state physics, but we're not talking Star Trek here just yet...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
i'm searching google news for reports of missing whales in san diego...and down-to-earth, cute, blond marine biologist...
Nobody has ever been able to answer this question to my satisfaction. Was it so that the audience could see those whales get beamed into the cargo hold? I think they should have just gone with plain old aluminum. No temporal loops to worry about that way...
Eh, I did this for my fifth grade science project. Nice to see the scientific community is finally catching up with my ingenious and groundbreaking work.
I was more impressed that the facility just happened to have a molecular modelling tool installed, and that Scotty learned how to use it in seconds. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
First off, the article specifies far UV. It's closer to X-ray (which goes through all kinds of things) than it is to visible light. Furthermore, the claim that "any material that blocks one of those ranges almost always blocks the others" is silly. Sunglasses and sunscreen are two examples that block UV quite well but are transparent visibly (in fact, glass falls into that category - UV light bulbs use quartz). Water blocks most IR a lot better than it blocks visible light. CO2 (and all other greenhouse gases, including water vapor) pass visible light but block IR, while ozone blocks UV instead.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples; those are just off the top of my head. We can see the narrow band of frequencies that we call visible light specifically because they go through the relevant materials - atmospheric gases and water - quite well, so our eyes evolved for them.
That said, I like the rest of your post (well, I have my concerns about some of the ideas, but I like the thought-provoking aspect). I just wanted to clarify that "close" in the EM spectrum does NOT mean that the transparency and other behavior is consistent across materials or conditions. Heck, any HAM operator has probably experienced cases where a relatively small shift in band (much less than the near multiple of two that visible light spans) will penetrate a material or propagate off off the ionosphere much better.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Arstechnica discovers nothing - They only spit back what they read from others at most. Mere "regurgitative reporting", 9/10 times, & nothing more.
Can someone explain what exactly might qualify a material to be in a new state of matter? What I'm wondering is if they are just trying to attract attention by making wild claims, or if this really is just some new state of matter. Speaking of which, is there a limit to the number of states that we know matter can exist in?
I've always wondered why the hell they needed at all the Aluminium to be transparent for the whales!!! They went to so much trouble even to change the history of humanity by introducing that new technology before its time and for what? so that the wales could see better the walls of the Enterprise? Why didn't they use simple steel walls? Jaysus! the guy that wrote the script is lucky I am not a Klingon!
"I can give you the transparent aluminum, captain, but you'll only have forty femtoseconds to use it."
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
If I had a pound for every new state of matter I read about on Slashdot...
They have probably taken a blast of 200 eV X-rays (pretty soft for X-rays, but I have used them for flying-spot radiography) and knocked out a K-shell electron. This leaves the atoms in a state where it takes a little time (femtoseconds) for the electrons to get back and to chuck out the energy. This will probably make the atoms look at bit like silicon - the outer shells will 'see' something a lot like a silicon nucleus - one less proton in the nucleus and one less electron in the K-shell more or less cancels out when viewed from the outside. What we have here is an inverted energy level. You have this state inside every laser. Hardly a new state of matter.
This leads to the cool idea that pumped Aluminium might lase in the UV, and then go reflective, stopping any back-pulse. This sort of thing was considered as an anti-missile 'Star Wars' option. I think they were pumping copper, not aluminium.
About 5 years ago I remember a similar claim by either 3M or NEC about creating actual transparent aluminium. Was I dreaming that I read this on Slashdot years ago?
They're Oxford scientists. They created transparent aluminium.
when do the transparent macbooks come out?
3M had "invented" a form of ceramic aluminum that was transparent like 10 years ago. /. is really starting to suck the big one.
Not that anyone is going to read down this far. But what would make transparent aluminum so useful or even transparent steel a neat engineering material would be that you would have something with the formability of aluminum, that then could be heat treated to a certain surface hardness while still remaining transparent. Aluminum oxide and ceramics are all very well and good but the post and the responses kind of miss the point. Speaking as a metallurgist (or former metallurgist now, whatever) that is where the useful engineering properties come in. Etching it to check the heat treat would be very interesting also. I wonder what would happen? Hell, who knows what etchant you would even use? That would be some cool materials science and good luck to whoever, ever manages it. It really would be a new form of matter.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
In the article
''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,â(TM) said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford Universityâ(TM)s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper.
Of course no one has seen it before. IT IS INVISIBLE!
WTF? They made that measurement up! Oh, wait, never mind I looked it up. 40 femtoseconds == 4000 Zepposeconds. Whatever that means I'm sure it's not a very long time, and it only affected "a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair", and there's that offhanded reference "nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation", which all adds up to an incredibly useless product...though I'm sure it's really exciting with all those "lasers" and whatnot.
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