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."

Comments

This is a great breakthrough...

[ls671]

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

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[lorenlal]

But can we be sure that this is the guy who actually invented it?

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Rei]

A "keyboard"... how quaint.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tin foil hats are made from tin foil. If you're using aluminum foil, you're making an aluminum foil hat.

Incidentally, aluminum is not very effective at blocking the government's mind control rays. Why do you think they replaced tin foil with aluminum foil? Luckily I stocked up decades ago, but anyone who thinks aluminum foil will protect them is playing right into the government's hands.

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[mcgrew]

I saw this at New Scientist yesterday and almost submitted it, until I actually read the article. The bombardment that makes it transparent only lasts for fractions of a nanosecond before the foil is comlpetely destroyed. A few commenters there pointed to some wikipedia articles with other transparent metals. One commenter said

I always thought the "transparent aluminum" of Startrek was a tongue-in-cheek thing - on the basis that it has existed both naturally and man-made for donkeys years. Ok, it is aluminium OXIDE (sapphire) instead of JUST aluminium - but it is transparent, incredibly strong, extremely hard and is made out of nowt more exotic than aluminium and oxygen.

Ruby the same of course but with a few chromium atoms bunged in for good measure and a nice red tint.

Then there's Aluminium oxynitride which comes far closer to the Star Trek windows:

Aluminium oxynitride (AlON) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. It is marketed under the name ALON and described in U.S. Patent 4,520,116. The material remains solid up to 1,200 C (2,190 F), and is harder than glass. When formed and polished as a window, the material currently (2005) costs about US$10 to US$15 per square inch (~ US$20,000/m).

It is currently the crucial outer layer of experimental transparent armor being considered by the US Air Force for the windows of armored vehicles. Other applications include semiconductors and retail fixtures.

Transparent ceramics:

Most ceramic materials, such as alumina and its compounds, are formed from fine powders, yielding a fine grained polycrystalline microstructure which is filled with scattering centers comparable to the wavelength of visible light. Thus, they are generally opaque materials, as opposed to transparent materials. Recent nanoscale technology has, however, made possible the production of polycrystalline transparent ceramics such as transparent alumina.

The value of the work described in TFA isn't that they made transparent aluminum, but

for an instant, Wark and his team can create a new state of matter that is as dense as ordinary solid matter, but extremely hot. "That is the sort of matter you would get towards the centre of a giant planet," says Wark.

The team hopes to study the properties of this hot, dense matter using new, more powerful lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, California. These lasers produce higher-energy X-rays that could probe the structure of the new material and measure its properties - perhaps providing some insight into the heart of Jupiter and the other giant planets.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Verdatum]

How do we know that you aren't the government, cleverly trying to get the masses to switch from their effective aluminum foil to worthless tin foil??

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[asdf7890]

A "keyboard"... how quaint.

So why was he so good with it? Punch cards are quaint from my perspective but I wouldn't know where to start with them. Is he also proficient with using a morse code transmitter?

Maybe using an "old style" keyboard had become something of a game, something that engineering students would compete on to prove they were hard core.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is only a piece of entertainment. If you are going to fail to suspend disbelief at the moment Scotty is able to use a keyboard proficiently how did you get through the previous scenes like the time travel thing, the whales communicating with aliens, and so on.

I will go shoot myself now, for being sad enough to post the above!

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's so simple. Only a great fool would reach for the tin foil hat. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose aluminum foil hat. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose tin foil hat.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[daVinci1980]

I saw this at New Scientist yesterday and almost submitted it, until I actually read the article.

Oh you newbies, reading articles before submitting them.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Pollardito]

So their breakthrough was creating something that is both dense and extremely hot? The same sort of thing can be found at most every bar I've been to

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[Chris Burke]

So, you're saying that NEITHER tin nor aluminum is effective?!?

That's right. The only thing you can do is spend a year building up an immunity to government mind control rays.

Re:This is a great breakthrough...

[dissy]

A "keyboard"... how quaint.

So why was he so good with it? Punch cards are quaint from my perspective but I wouldn't know where to start with them. Is he also proficient with using a morse code transmitter?

Because he's Scotty. He's bad ass!

Don't you watch the show?

P.S., yes, he is proficient in morse code. Even lowly captain picard knows how to write long instructions in binary!
And we all know the engineers know waaaay more than the officers, in any time period :D

(Two more stamps on my geek card and I get a free sandwich!)

Frankly

[Vinegar Joe]

I just can't see it.

"Tansparent"

[4D6963]

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.

Re:"Tansparent"

[furby076]

Typically, in research, the first hurdle is to get a repeatable and reliable test case that has almost no practical use (ala this situation). Once they accomplish that hurdle (also sometimes referred to as proof of concept) they can proceed to make it last longer (e.g. make it permenant), make it work better (e.g. invisible to the visible spectrum), make it cheaper for mass production (e.g. so we can build large versions of these) and then continue other improvements.

Basically this was a HUGE hurdle - they were able to show this is possible. Now they will get more funding and they can continue...hopefully we will see (or in this case not see) invisible alumnimum in the future and eventually other items.

BTW - similar systems (recent article) was the Green diode laser. Now with green diode lasers we will eventually have TVs using lasers to draw our images.

Temporary

[drunken_boxer777]

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.

Al2O3 is transparent

[OrangeTide]

Sapphire glass has been common place for many decades. It is by weight a little more than half Aluminum and very transparent.

Oxford

[fprintf]

Since the researchers are at Oxford, shouldn't the new material be "Aluminium"?

Adjectives and YOU!

[Alzheimers]

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.

Before jumping to conclusions, read the article

[Nautical Insanity]

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.

this is proof

[prgrmr]

That the slashdot editors do not RTFA either.

No, they didn't make transparent aluminum.

[Animats]

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.

How many times now?

[mseeger]

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

Why I do remember crap like this?

[Allicorn]

Dupe!

"Transparent Aluminum a Reality!"
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0337213

From Tuesday October 18 2005.