Slashdot Mirror
Sticky Tape Found To Emit Terahertz Radiation
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from New Scientist "'Peeling sticky tape has already been shown to produce X-rays, so Joseph Horvat and Roger Lewis of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, tried to see if it could create lower-frequency terahertz radiation. "We were rather pleasantly surprised to obtain a clear signal in our first attempt," says Horvat. Strongly adhesive Scotch Magic 810 tape and weakly adhesive electrical tape both yielded strong terahertz signals, ranging from 0.1 to 10 terahertz, but only about a microwatt of power, too little for practical use (Optics Letters, vol 34, p 2195). Horvat says that refinements should increase the power by orders of magnitude.' It may be old news to Slashdot that [peeling clear tape] had been proved to produce X-rays, but watching the linked video where they use tape to expose X-ray film was pretty amazing."
From now on, it's staples for everything.
i've been using it to cook my meals for YEARS
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
So, does peeling duct tape emit gamma bursts?
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
Is there a practical application for this? Does mechanically peeling tape require less power than producing the same radiation through more conventional means or with simpler materials?
I can appreciate the gee-whiz nature of it but I can't quite figure out what value it has outside of the sciencey aspect of it.
But can it give me super powers!?
Doesn't sound odd to me at all. Last time I checked EVERYTHING emanated something in the Terahertz region of the spectrum. Its like infra-red in that its darn hard not to give off a signature of some kind. That's how you can use it in the airports for monitoring for hidden weapons without dousing people with all kinds of xrays. Things that are more dense give off more T-waves. If you peal tape off something it causes a release of energy, and part of that will be thermal, and part T-waves.
Strongly adhesive Scotch Magic 810 tape and weakly adhesive electrical tape both yielded strong terahertz signals,
I propose that we add two new fundamental forces to our physics lexicon - "strongly adhesive" and "weakly adhesive".
#DeleteChrome
Not to be a troll, but who cares? I read TFA, which was basically just a shallow page to link to the original PDF article, for which they want me to pay $35 to read. There was some vague talk of how it might help "Medical Lasers" (Sharks?), but nothing substantial.
There's no discussion of application, and no discussion of how the experiment was performed. I suppose that I take it on faith that cows really do fart methane, and I'll have to take it on faith that tape really does fart terahertz radiation.
How did this end up on Slashdot's main page? This isn't even good enough to slide in on the Science section.
when will the first person be arrested for trying to take scotch tape into a plane ?
The blanket on my bed (don't know what it's made of) emits sparks, especially when the air is dry (like winter when I use it). I wonder what other radiation/photons it emits besides visible light?
Does sticky tape cause cancer?
Free Martian Whores!
If anyone is curious about how this happens, it is due to the very high voltages developed on clear sticky-tape when it is unrolled. The peeling action tends to create a very uneven distribution of charges on the tape surface... the tape itself is a wonderful insulator, and as a result the charges cannot easily snap back to equilibrium states.
:-(
This causes very high voltages and, where the tape is just being unrolled from the roll, extreme electric field as the distance is so small. (Remember, Electric field is measured in V/m!). Charges arc through the air easier than they can travel through the tape, so you get all sorts of emissions from this miniature lightning storm as the voltage drops back to a static level of 'only' about a kV.
Incidentally, this is why you should always use special ESD-approved tape when working anywhere around electrostatic-discharge-sensitive devices. My company's ESD training class had some quite interesting demonstrations where stuff was destroyed with a single piece of freshly unrolled tape. Unfortunately for me, I had yet to learn that lesson in graduate school, and so I ruined many a sensitive analog ASIC by taping a supposedly protective dust cover over the bare IC* (we were too cheap to pay for the black packaging that most people call a "chip").
*Note to all the pedants out there: Yes, a fabricated IC has its own natural shield of silicon dioxide (glass) on top of the deposited layers, however the tens-of-micron-thin wire bonds that connected the IC to my prototyping board were exposed to air, and could easily be broken--or worse, shorted--by errant dust particles.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Peeling tape doesn't make this radiation; peeling tape in a vacuum does.
Great misleading headline, article summary, and in fact article for skipping over this requirement which most of us won't see in our kitchens, offices, or garages.
I can see al qaeda ordering boat loads of it for a mass suicide tape pulling! Does this also mean tape may be declared a weapon of mass destruction ;)
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
How do I get the job where I think of things to test to see if they do random other things and how much does it pay. I would like to start by seeing if removing the lid from my polar pop produces microwaves so that I can cook my under cooked gas station hot dog.
Putting sticky tape on my glasses as we speak.
IANANP 'n I'm just ask'n but could this be a solution to Large Hadron Collider Struggling ? We all know if it weren't for Einstein running at the speed of light while shaving we wouldn't even have a Special Theory of Relativity. But like I said I'm just throw'n the idea out there.
ideopath @ play
It hurts terribly when you peel off a Band-Aid
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
...or is it the GREATEST discovery?
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Generating terahertz radiation, especially coherent Terahertz radiation, is hard because the frequency (around 300GHz - 20THz) is too low for conventional solid-state laser technology and too high for conventional electronic antennas. And it is potentially useful for a range of applications such as nondestructive high-resolution imaging (for e.g. materials, medical, and security applications), spectroscopy, or opening up new communications bandwidths. (Google "terahertz applications" and you'll find a lot of links.)
There are a number of terahertz sources that are becoming available, from optical rectification schemes to free-electron lasers, but they have a tendency to be bulky and inefficient, so a lot of researchers are looking for alternative generation schemes.
That being said, I suspect that the terahertz radiation produced by sticky tape is incoherent, which would severely limit its utility in practical applications. (Quite apart from the efficiency, which sounds like it is currently very low.) That doesn't mean that it isn't interesting from a basic science perspective, of course.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Terahertz sources don't require particle accelerators. See my post above ("Terahertz generation is an interesting problem".)
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/22/1757257
Sticky tape emits useful terahertz rays
...but only about a microwatt of power, too0 little for practical use
So.. "too little for practical use" tells me it's impractical. When I think of impractical, I don't think "useful"
"...it could create lower-frequency terahertz radiation."
Isn't tera 10 to the 12th? Would that not be high frequency radiation? It sits between Microwaves and Infrared.
Don't take this as a personal criticism, because it's not... For those who want to properly use the phrase "Beg the Question" though, here's a fun explanation:
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=693
I've noticed that if you peel tape in low light, you can see a blue glow as the tape separates (try it for yourself). I wonder though, if this simply a static electrical discharge or evidence of something more going on?
This soooo needs to be a McGuyver episode.
which should be obvious to any slashdot reader:
fusion power from sticky tape!
(give me funding)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Check out this nice article:
http://pages.towson.edu/ladon/wg/candywww.htm#SciAmer
(also see the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence)
Article says sugar's light emission on crystal breaking is lightning on a small scale, charge separation causing electrons to jump and nitrogen emission. Doesn't describe x-rays or use of vacuum.
I am wondering:
- Could an x-ray or terahertz wave guide be included somehow in the adhesive used
- Would striking rocks against each other, or a cigarette lighter flint etc. also generate x-rays. Maybe best to stay away from sparky things?
- That finger x-ray image looks dangerous. My grandfather had terrible burns that never healed on his fingertips because dentists used to hold the x-ray film in their patients' mouths while taking x-rays, in the olden days.
I process my own film and have always noticed, especially with TMAX B&W 120 rolls that - when I finish loading the film into the development spool - as I peel off the tape holding it onto the original film spool, I can see "stars" sparkle as it's peeled. Of course this is done in total darkness (no red light) and after my eyes have fully dilated in the pitch black. Also helps to not look directly at it but slightly to the side because highly sensitive rods in the eye are concentrated around the perimeter of the retina whereas colour-sensitive but not as light sensitive cones are concentrated in the middle. Haven't tried this with any other kind of tape.
-- Ben
BTW - Ilford makes the sticky tape you lick when you finish shooting a roll of 120 film spearmint flavoured which I think is a nice touch. Wonder if THAT's radioactive too?
Peeling a duct tape a day keeps the doctor away!
Try opening one of those no-lick-required instant-seal envelopes in the dark, it lights up enough to really impress the kids! But now I'm going to be worrying about the radiation :(
I use the Breathe Right Strips at night. Sometimes I open the little packets in the dark, and I see two bands of light as I peel the packet open.
A microwatt terahertz radiation would be a great thing. That made me check their paper. In the Optics Letters the authors just write they had " 1 microwatt", which became "about a microwatt of power" in the linked blog. The maximum really measured was just 0.1 nW. Even assuming that they can focus only 1% of the THz radiation on the detector (I didn't find them specifying it) it seems to be *much* less than 1 microwatt.