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X-Ray Laser For Creating Supercharged Particles
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."
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...
A shark with a supercharger?
There ya go.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"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.
They should also reverse the polarity. That would be cool.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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."
'Everyone' knows about the efficiency theoretically, but they actually made it work at such high frequencies and they superseded the expected practical limits by a large margin.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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm no physicist but...
Would this have any application as auxilliary heating in tokamaks? Does it work efficiently with light elements?
...no more turbo lag.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think they ran this story just to feature the shark-fin icon. So to the Slashdot gods: yeah, many of us "get it."