X-Ray Laser For Creating Supercharged Particles

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X-Ray Laser For Creating Supercharged Particles

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday November 11, 2012 @07:02PM from the charge-it-up dept.

William Robinson writes "Scientists have found way to use X-Ray Lasers to create supercharged particles. The specific tuning of the laser's properties can cause atoms and molecules to resonate. The resonance excites the atoms and causes them to shake off electrons at a rate that otherwise would require higher energies. This could be used to create highly charged plasma."

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IANAP by gagol · 2012-11-11 19:06 · Score: 3, Interesting

I am not a theorical phycisist... Would it help achieve achieve sustainable fusion? What applications do this new cool tech can provide? Thanks to the boffins around for your time.

--
Tomorrow is another day...
1. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 19:13 · Score: 0
  
  Probably not. A lot of power is lost on the magnets to hold the atoms in place.
2. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 23:02 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I am not a theorical phycisist... Would it help achieve achieve sustainable fusion? What applications do this new cool tech can provide? Thanks to the boffins around for your time.
  An example for applciation: High charged particles are used for ion-beam radiotherapy in the fight against cancer. There are no known side-effects like at chemotherapy, but of course you cannot use the beam for every type of cancer. Unfortunately, the acutal beam of high chared particles needs an particle-accelerator which dimensons surpasses any garage. The new tech could probaly shrink the size of an ion generator, which would help to spreade the therapy with ions more to compensate the common x-ray radiotherapy with its bad collateral damage. (see Bragg-Peak)
3. Re:IANAP by peragrin · 2012-11-11 23:12 · Score: 1
  
  fusion I want plasma weapons .
  created a dense field of plasma and fire it out of a coil gun.
  
  --
  i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
4. Re:IANAP by gagol · 2012-11-11 23:17 · Score: 1
  
  Superb information, someone mod it up and thanks to the AC.
  
  --
  Tomorrow is another day...
5. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 01:39 · Score: 0
  
  Lightsabers
6. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 02:18 · Score: 1
  
  What I've seen of heavy ion beam therapy uses carbon ions, which should be something that could be fully ionized in something the size of shoe-box to a mini-fridge depending on if you want to count the power supply and vacuum equipment. The majority of the size is that ion based therapy uses much higher energies of couple hundred MeV per particle than other kinds of beam based therapy. This probably won't help much with that, especially considering in this case the x-ray laser source uses a GeV electron accelerator. Although if they get it to work with much weaker x-ray laser sources, it might help a little.
7. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 02:41 · Score: 1
  
  For fusion, at least thermal based fusion, the temperatures used would be thousand times that what is needed to ionize hydrogen or helium. So the fuel is fully ionized through the majority of the plasma in most fusion setups, with the hard part being keeping plasma hot and dense enough so there is time for nuclei to collied and fuse. Higher atomic number elements would be harder to fully ionize, but also would require higher temperatures for fusion anyway.
  Although the problem with larger elements, is they radiate a lot of energy, turning thermal energy into light that easily escapes the thin plasma in magnetic confinement plasmas. Even though the core of a fusion plasma is hot enough to fully strip most iron ions, there are still a few around, and more so on the colder edges of the plasma, and it is a major source of energy loss from the plasma. Usually this is dealt with by just being careful what materials are introduced to the plasma, so there are fewer impurities to worry about in the first place, although there are cases where the cooling is used constructively, with impurities added if they can be kept to specific regions. Fully ionizing them could help some, but I highly doubt the process of generating these x-rays would be anywhere near the power level needed to make that a net gain, and will be that way for a long time. And if they could get the particle accelerator component used in the FEL much more efficient, it might mean is more of an option than using muon-catalyzed fusion would be a more serious thing to consider at that point than shaving off a few percent of the energy loss on a fusion reactor.
8. Re:IANAP by the+gnat · 2012-11-12 03:59 · Score: 1
  
  This probably won't help much with that, especially considering in this case the x-ray laser source uses a GeV electron accelerator.
  And is several miles long - it's dug into the hillside above Stanford.
9. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 07:08 · Score: 0
  
  This is what Peter Hagelstein was developing before his research got co-opted by his thesis advisor to lend credibility to the ludicrous Reagan-era atom-bomb-pumpe-X-ray-lasers-from-space project. Of course, none of Peter Hagelstein's other la-la-land technology dreams have been founded in reallity either. (Take a look at his constant refrains about how there really is something to cold fusion, scrambling unrelated pieces of irreproducible research results to claim that it *must* be a working, coherent whole, if only people would throw more money down that set of unrelated pits.)
10. Re:IANAP by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 10:23 · Score: 0
  
  The new tech could probaly shrink the size of an ion generator,
  
  Ion Cannon charging...
A shark with a supercharger? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 19:07 · Score: 0

A shark with a supercharger?
1. Re:A shark with a supercharger? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2012-11-11 19:19 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  A shark with a supercharger?
  There ya go.
  
  --
  "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
2. Re:A shark with a supercharger? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 21:47 · Score: 0
  
  A shark with a supercharger?
  There ya go.
  What? No laser?
3. Re:A shark with a supercharger? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 21:48 · Score: 0
  
  how about a shark with a laser beam
4. Re:A shark with a supercharger? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-13 00:37 · Score: 0
  
  Please, let's take seriously. We are talking about head-mounted-laser-sharks! Some people just don't have a care for hard science.
Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2012-11-11 19:13 · Score: 0

Exciting molecules by resonance: a kitchen microwave does that.
Shaking molecules until they lose their electrons? That's called heating. That's how CRTs work.
So, these guys found a way to heat up a bit of material with X-ray lasers... M'kay...
The only substantial passage of the article is where they say researchers can use their "recipe" to maximize (or minimize the effect). That's a bit thin...

--
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
1. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Rakshasa-sensei · 2012-11-11 19:25 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  "The resonance excites the atoms and causes them to shake off electrons at a rate that otherwise would require higher energies."
  Sometimes the difference between something significant and something already done lies in the details that stupid people are too quick to gloss over.
2. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2012-11-11 19:34 · Score: 0
  
  Did you read what I wrote? Heating atoms by making them enter resonance is not new, and everybody knows the efficiency is maximum at resonance. All these guys did is change the frequency, more or less.
  
  --
  "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
3. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by someone1234 · 2012-11-11 19:48 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  They should also reverse the polarity. That would be cool.
  
  --
  Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
4. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by The+Master+Control+P · 2012-11-11 19:56 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  This isn't "heating atoms by making them enter resonance." It's, ah, one of those details that GP was talking about. The part where the inner electrons of large atoms follow many and complicated multi-photon-absorbtion paths to being ionized, which extremely high-spin orbitals as well as a near continuum of high-laying Rydberg orbitals, which mean that slight changes in pulse length, shaping, and frequency will be able to have a large effect on ionization rates.
  
  Let me give you a hint: If there's a paper being published in Nature about it, they probably did not, in fact, "just, like, change the dial, man."
5. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Rakshasa-sensei · 2012-11-11 19:59 · Score: 1
  
  'Everyone' knows about the efficiency theoretically, but they actually made it work at such high frequencies and they superseded the expected practical limits by a large margin.
  You still can't think it seems.
6. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 20:02 · Score: 1
  
  Tuning a laser to the resonant frequency of a specific atom so that it requires LESS energy to strip electons than theoretically calculated is NOT the same thing as heating the bipolar water molecules in your cup-o-soup while you're on break from workin in the coal mine.
  M'kay...
  Seems odd that it's x-rays that escape a black hole, though it may be coincidental. Do you think there's a connection, and would you speculate on how many kitchen microwaves it might take to allow this to happen? Or what exactly is resonating in the standard model of xenon. Is it the electrons themselves or is there something about the nucleus that changes, making it a less energetic process by which the electrons are held in orbit around this newly configured mass. Perhaps the photon bombardment has found a harmonic that effects the strong nuclear attraction of protons within their otherwise stable configuration.
  I wonder what harmonics are generated.
7. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Konster · 2012-11-11 20:07 · Score: 0
  
  You could always sublux the inverter through the phase array, which is a faster way of corrugating the tachyons than simply reversing the polarity.
8. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 20:20 · Score: 0
  
  You're talking to a gentleman who regularly ends high-speed chases with his cruiser in the Hazzard County Car Wash.
  Of course he doesn't get it.
9. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by delt0r · 2012-11-11 22:27 · Score: 2
  
  Real physicists publish in Physics Review or their like. Not that crap that is Nature and Science.
  
  Pro tip, Nature and Science don't care about good science, they care about citations, aka their own impact factor. That often means controversial/political topics (to a point), wrong, or so short that there is no science in the paper (massive supplements don't count).
  
  --
  If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
10. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 23:10 · Score: 0
  
  They should also reverse the polarity. That would be cool.
  Or cross the beams.
11. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 00:28 · Score: 0
  
  DOH! "beams"
  streams. cross the STREAMS......
12. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  It isn't that hard to get a paper into a Physics Review or PRL, and for some fields, that is kind of the go to journal(s). Many physicists would be happy to publish in Nature and would consider it a step up in publicity. It is not like it makes the science in their paper worse, and I doubt many get rejected from Physics Review and decide to submit to Nature next as a backup.
13. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 03:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Microwave ovens don't use any particular resonance and aren't even near the peak absorption, off by a factor of 10 in frequency from the peak for room temperature water and still off by a factor of 3-4 for boiling water (peak varies from ~100 GHz for 0 C water to ~10 GHz for 100 C water). The frequency used in microwave ovens is determined by what blocks of the spectrum have been allocated for industrial use and economics. It is why in industrial microwave ovens they use 900 MHz, because it is another industrial block and cheaper to make large, high power sources for than 2.4 GHz. For home use, the 2.4 GHz is a little more compact, but cheaper, especially in the past, than jumping up to the 5.8 GHz band. Additionally, putting the food in a metal box so that the microwaves can make several passes without much else to absorb it means that particular efficiency of water is not that important as long as it is much more than the walls (although hot spots when trying to defrost stuff can kind of suck).
  That said, this work here is pretty substantial. If you wanted disparage this work, you could have maybe instead have compared it to the large amount of work on multiphoton ionization work done by (non-x-ray) laser material interaction research, as this doesn't have much to do with heating the atoms There has been a lot of work into how multiphoton absorption can trigger and be used for ionization (or to deal with it when it is counter productive). However, there is still a ways to go on the modeling. A couple different models make different assumptions to simplify the quantum mechanics calculations, and the impact and usefulness of those assumptions is still being looked at. Testing these models at much higher energies and ionizations like here is a major step toward that. Maybe that is why the paper spends some effort comparing results to predictive models. And not to say that further optimizing and experimental refinement of the use of LCLS is not noteworthy.
14. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 03:22 · Score: 0
  
  Seems odd that it's x-rays that escape a black hole, though it may be coincidental.
  Or maybe something you don't remember correctly. Hawking radiation that escapes a black hole would be made of a soup of particles that have antiparticles and what they might decay into, so a lot of electrons and neutrinos and gamma rays in the end, although initially it would be just leptons and baryons, not gamma rays. You are probably referring to the x-rays observed and expected to be coming from the accretion disk around a black hole. At that point, any light would escape. The distinction for x-rays, is that the matter falling into a black hole would be heated up quite hot from the friction as the material transfer angular momentum to other material so it can fall in. Hot enough that the blackbody radiation peaks in the x-ray band, something that doesn't happen much elsewhere and is a clear signature that astronomers can look for, not to mention the potential for high resolution imaging as x-ray optics improve. However, structure of the accretion disks can also be studied with radio waves, and may have high resolution imaging from large base line radio telescopes, because the blackbody emission (and other emissions) are across most of the EM spectrum.
  
  Or what exactly is resonating in the standard model of xenon
  It is the electron structure, same as multiphoton absorption at lower energies.
15. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by Sulphur · 2012-11-12 03:51 · Score: 1
  
  M'kay...
  Seems odd that it's x-rays that escape a black hole, though it may be coincidental.
  X-rays are electromagnetic radiation that does not escape black holes. It would be neat because unlike light it is dark.
16. Re:Sorry but this sounds like non-news to me by PerlPunk · 2012-11-12 04:29 · Score: 1
  
  I think they ran this story just to feature the shark-fin icon. So to the Slashdot gods: yeah, many of us "get it."
Anyone else? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 20:22 · Score: 0

Have the x-ray harvest the power of thoose electrons, then have the x-ray exciting the atoms, which in turn powers the x-ray, which excite the atoms, which.....
Perpetual much?
1. Re:Anyone else? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 21:48 · Score: 0
  
  Resonance isn't a code word for magical free energy.
2. Re:Anyone else? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 04:53 · Score: 0
  
  It is just multiphoton absorption. Instead of exciting/expelling an electron with a single photon of the correct energy, you are hitting it with 3 or 5, etc., photons with a third or fifth of the energy each respectively. The atom absorbs the same amount of energy in either case. And the absorption of multiple photons is much less frequent than single photon absorption, getting substantially worse for more photons. So you need a crap ton more photons to do multiphoton absorption, making it rather inefficient... although possibly more efficient than generating the shorter wavelength needed for single photon absorption.
I, for one, by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 21:44 · Score: 0

Welcome our highly-charged plasma-creating frikken' shark overlords.
Just what we need by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 21:59 · Score: 0

The US military establishment will come up with numerous uses for highly charged plasma.
As if! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 23:06 · Score: 0

Oh Derrrrrr! This has been known for years.
Nucleus Stabilisation via Electron Orbitals by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 23:19 · Score: 3, Interesting

Dysprosium was one of the first elements to be tinkered with in this way.
Odd thing is , that stable nuclei can become unstable as electrons are removed.
The electron cloud is in some way involved in conserving the nucleus.
1. Re:Nucleus Stabilisation via Electron Orbitals by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 04:46 · Score: 1
  
  Source? I can't seem to find anything on google.
2. Re:Nucleus Stabilisation via Electron Orbitals by AnotherAnonymousUser · 2012-11-12 06:18 · Score: 2
  
  I agree with the other commenter. Citations if you've got them - I want to know more =)!
3. Re:Nucleus Stabilisation via Electron Orbitals by michwill · 2012-11-12 14:22 · Score: 1
  
  Google "dysprosium 163 naked nucleus", it finds the information
How efficient is this? by benjfowler · 2012-11-11 23:30 · Score: 1

I'm no physicist but...
Would this have any application as auxilliary heating in tokamaks? Does it work efficiently with light elements?
Supercharged? Excellent... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-11 23:42 · Score: 1

...no more turbo lag.
What "supercharged particles"? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2012-11-11 23:47 · Score: 2

Is this the same thing that we called "highly ionized" when I was younger? The writing of the article is atrocious, I have the feeling that somebody was gleefully playing with words like a small child. There is no such thing as "very highly charged plasma" - at least comparatively, compared to the total number of free charge carriers - ions and free electrons. It it were, the whole thing wouldn't simply hold together. Plasma is outwardly electrically neutral, or almost neutral.

--
Ezekiel 23:20
1. Re:What "supercharged particles"? by baffled · 2012-11-12 01:19 · Score: 1
  
  IANAP, but if what you say is accurate, it seems 'highly charged plasma' would consist of more free electrons per ion on average.. Effectively, more electrons are stripped from the atoms. Which is precisely what it says in the article. I was also confused by the use of the term "supercharged", as it appears to connote highly charged, and not the "supercharge" related to supersymmetry.
  I am surprised the data they gathered here is new. It would seem prudent for scientists to gather data on the absorptance spectrum for all elements, ever since these properties were first discovered. Some kind of frequency-varying emitter & charge detection mechanism to generate the data. Perhaps this is an effect that requires stable, precise frequencies that would be impractical to discover over a wide-range of frequencies for all elements?
2. Re:What "supercharged particles"? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 06:54 · Score: 0
  
  Fine, what if they use an electromagnetic field to induce separation between the positively charged nuclei and the resultant electron cloud? You could call the nuclei cluster an anti-plasma of highly charged particles, if that will make you feel any better.
  Which it won't...
3. Re:What "supercharged particles"? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 08:10 · Score: 1
  
  While plasma in most situations is roughly neutral, it is not inherently so. Research in non-neutral plasmas is an active field. The most practical application currently is understanding charged particle beams and their use in things from accelerators to some kinds of microwave generating sources. Additionally, research is done on low temperature trapped charged particles, for uses such as measuring fundamental particle and atomic properties, test beds for antimatter storage, or research into dynamics (interesting stuff like low temperature "plasma crystals" when the particles spread out and take an ordered form). This is a rather minor component of plasma physics in general though, so most of the time, plasma physics simplifies things by assuming quasineutrality in many situations where the plasma is obviously neutral.
  And when I hear "highly ionized," I usually associate that with a high ionization fraction for a given ionization state, not that the ions each are highly ionized. Maybe they were trying to refer to a plasma that was disassociated disproportionately to its temperature, a form of thermal non-equilibrium, although I've never heard that terminology used before.
4. Re:What "supercharged particles"? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2012-11-12 09:44 · Score: 1
  
  Good luck with trying to do that. Electromagnetic interaction will kick your butt.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
Re:Gravy... NOT THE GRAVY!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 00:00 · Score: 0

Man
You're completely insane.
Alex Jones is a nut.
Awesome by Flipstylee · 2012-11-12 00:12 · Score: 1

IANAPP, but have been a = average musician for a while, and from what i gather from TFA, they're creating a resonance that "maximizes the loss of electrons in a sample". It looks to me as if they've found a "harmonic" frequency for a given Element, that can either be used to coerce electrons out, or avoid as they need. I used all those words broadly, i'm just trying to picture it. The idea of Quanta is something that has always had me going in circles. Max Planck Ftw.
This procedure... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-12 05:10 · Score: 0

...is very unlikely to cause a resonance cascade scenario.