Slashdot Mirror
Physicists Have Created the Brightest Light Ever Recorded (vice.com)
Jason Koebler writes: A group of physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Extreme Light Laboratory announced Monday that they have created the brightest light ever produced on Earth using Diocles, one of the most powerful lasers in the United States. When this high intensity laser pulse, which is one billion times brighter than the surface of the sun, strikes the electron, it causes it to behave differently. By firing this laser at individual electrons, the researchers found that past a certain threshold, the brightness of light will actually change an object's appearance rather than simply making it brighter. The x-rays that are produced in this fashion have an extremely high amount of energy, and Umstadter and his colleagues think this could end up being applied in a number of ways. For starters, it could allow doctors to produce x-ray medical images on the nanoscale, which would allow them to detect tumors and other anomalies that regular x-rays might have missed. Moreover, it could also be used for more sophisticated x-ray scanning at airports and other security checkpoints.
I'm surprised there's any science at all being done at UNL. All those bastards care about is football. There are cuts to academics because the state has a huge budget shortfall. But you can be certain that football won't face any cuts. When there were budget problems in 2008 and 2009, academics took huge cuts while they went full speed ahead on expensive renovations to the football stadium. The people in Lincoln are nutjobs who are obsessed with football and still think it's the late 1990s where they should contend for a national title every year. UNL would be much better off without football.
Is it brighter than all of those Microsoft employees?
> ... x-ray scanning at airports and other security checkpoints.
luggage or humans? Latter case, then please FU!
does it do a good job of re-heating coffee?
Now it is possible to play the original gameboy advance!
it could allow doctors to produce x-ray medical images on the nanoscale
However, researchers are still trying to overcome the slight technical difficulty of the patient being vaporized in the process.
Common, we know it's going to be used for nuclear bombs.
I seem to remember something about this kind of thing about 8 years or so ago, where the schwinger limit was postulated to be unreachable due to self-interactions of the beam...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.430...
and that due to these self-interactions, there was a theoretical fixed limit to photon flux in vacuum before the limit that would cause vacuum decay.
Did this work somehow exceed that prior work?
It aint Trump.
Or is that Shuckers? Smuckers?
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?
Not sure if highlighting uses for security is really going to make the slashdot crowd jump for joy.
We get the picture.
New tech, first comes military use, then homeland security, then think of the children uses.
I can remember that time when slashdot obligatorily linked to the arxiv.org preprint paper
oh how you have fallen /.
Cool research, reaching out to our knowledge's limit, matter's innermost secrets, and...
"Moreover, it could also be used for more sophisticated x-ray scanning at airports and other security checkpoints."
Laser to catch tarrists. Sometimes, just sometimes, I'd like to tar & feather one science journalist.
"In nature, an individual electron interacts with an individual photon pretty infrequently—about every four months, according to Umstadter."
That seems massively lacking in context to me.
Surely an electron within a carbon atom in a lump of coal 10m underground interacts a different amount to an electron within a carbon atom on a rock in the sun in the desert, and perhaps different to an electron in a transparent oxygen molecule high in the air.
Can someone explain it better?
Mod down, submitted post before finished by mistake. Reposted correctly after this.
"For starters, it could allow doctors to produce x-ray medical images on the nanoscale, which would allow them to detect tumors and other anomalies that regular x-rays might have missed. Moreover, it could also be used for more sophisticated x-ray scanning at airports and other security checkpoints."
Nice story, bro. But the funding and applications are mainly military.
Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye.
Pretty sure the blue LED on the front of my stereo is brighter.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
How does this laser compare to some of the brightest objects in the universe, such as gamma ray bursts and quasars?
Probably small differences, but remember that the EM force is mediated by light, so even underground the electrons are constantly absorbing and firing off photons among themselves.
That said, yes the enormous amount of photons being shot at us from the sun almost certainly means that an electron on the surface is going to be hit more often than one underground. I'm not entirely sure how much more often (ie: I don't know the natural rate of emission and absorption between electrons just sitting in a lump underground) but it will be a higher rate nonetheless.
Which brings us to the way we usually report numbers like that -- averaging. Photon emission and absorption are pretty random events at the best of times, never mind when you consider say a photon in the middle of a laser beam will be getting hit many, many more times than one floating around in space. But you average the two rates together (and as many other samples as you can measure) and then you can talk about an amount in a sensible manner that doesn't require going into a detailed description of a specific testing environment.
Physicists Have Created the Brightest Light Ever Recorded
It has been known for quite some time how that happens.
Ezekiel 23:20
...to find explosives stuffed up a Muslim's kazoo.
does the laser come with a shark mount?
After researchers in Nebraska create the brightest light, Kim Kardashian and her immediate family are now making their way to the university in order to *be* in that light.
Will be for BMW headlights. They seem to like to fit blindingly bright headlights. Yes it's great if it helps the BMW driver see but not so good if the drivers coming the other way can't see anything.
What I find more baffling is how this electron meets the same "individual" photon again every four months.
Yes, but how much popcorn can it make?
-Matt
One of two things happens.
1) the flesh between the imager and the molecules a few microns deep in the tissue will distort the wavefront rendering it non-bright (i.e. focusable) or
2) you jack up the power to compensate for the lost bightness and varporize the flesh.
Already, non-high brightness laser imaging of breast tissues and such are at the flesh burn limit so you can't actually use a more powerful laser. And there's no practical way to prevent the distortion from occuring.
Ergo the claim is rubbish.
You could still use it to look at surfaces of biopsies. But you don't need higher brightness to see indiviidual cells for that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yay new tech, let's sell it to DHS so they can put another scanner in the airports!
In other news, it seems people with tumors prefer United Airlines over any other airline.
However, researchers are still trying to overcome the slight technical difficulty of the patient being vaporized in the process.
That's why it will make an excellent airport security detector. It's guaranteed not to let any bomb or potential terrorist get past it.
So, what does 'brightest' mean?
More photons? Wow. I recall discussion of how to propel spacecraft with light. The Sun does indeed exert pressure on objects. Makes sense that at some point the 'light' you shine, if enough photons, may have interesting effects on it.
I'm assuming 'bright' doesn't mean anything to do with spectrum, or frequency, or such. That didn't make sense to me...But bright white light is often defined by color temperature, or spectrum. So...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"The goggles! They do nothing!
No cat will resist this new generation of laser pointers.
No matter where you go, there you are.
After his new discovery the damn researcher pointed it at an airliner to see if his new toy's light would reach that far.
What I find more baffling is how this electron meets the same "individual" photon again every four months.
"Repeated ending and renewing of a relationship is often called relationship cycling (Dailey, Pfister, Jin, Beck, & Clark, 2009), and this dynamic can threaten the health and well-being of the relationship and its members."
How about minorities. What about the bathrooms in this light facikity. Do they respect the spectrum of genders. These are the things we need to worry about in today's usa
Vice is hardly the place to go for coherent explanations, so -- other than apparently being able to cause a buttload (that's the Official Physics Term) of photons to be absorbed by one electron, how is this different from the more or less everyday 2- or 3- photon absorption process in things like passive Q-switch materials?
The only way an electron can emit an X-ray is by dropping from a very energetic orbital down to a very weak one. The only way that electron gets bumped up that high is either by absorbing said Buttload of energy all at once or by successive single-transition-energy photons in sequence, which is a much more difficult thing to makehappen anyway.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
... all the rednecks with lifted trucks who cram HID bulbs into stock headlight housings and then proceed to add a bright-as-the-sun LED light bar on their grill had already accomplished that. It never fails to see these bro trucks driving around in perfect weather blinding everyone in sight.
When this high intensity laser pulse, which is one billion times brighter than the surface of the sun, strikes the electron, it causes it to behave differently.
Obvious overflow bug in the electron. It's behaviour is only defined between 0 - 99999999.
Now all we need is a way to mount them on the heads of sharks...
Link to preprint: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/Com...
Diocles laser homepage: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/dio...
Sounds like using a toaster to electrocute yourself in a bathtub.
You would think there would be a better application for that.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!