Room Temperature Semiconductor of T-Rays 110
Fallen Andy noted a Physorg story that says "Engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University have demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based upon commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing." "What did you do at the office today, honey?" "Oh, I just demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz radiation. How was your day, dear?"
But wait! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But wait! Forget Z-Rays (Score:2)
MEMPTO RAYS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY
IN METAPARAPHILOSOPHICAL RADIATION
by Mempto
Despite Felcrodan's theory of 0335, there are, indeed, rays of energy that constantly bombard Britannia. In fact, these very same rays permeate of all the known space between Britannia and the stars. Recent experiments have proven my theory that these rays, known hereafter as "Mempto Rays", are lethal to all non-living matter. In fact, Mempto rays have demonstrated their ability numerous times, once killing an entire boulder in a matter of a few hours. It is my recommendation...
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I do have my shotgun, and hand to hand weapons ready though. I figure i can pick up a couple of assault rifles from fallen police officers.
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Zombies don't duck.
http://zombiehunters.org/ [zombiehunters.org]
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Sharks? (Score:5, Funny)
Does it come with a shark-head mount?
The summary leaves me unsure.
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Re:What can T-Rays do? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What can T-Rays do? (Score:4, Funny)
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No one is going to bribe Jimmy to change the entry on T-rays, and you're not going to find some fringe group gaming the system either(at least as far AFAIK), so it's probably pretty reliable.
Wikipedia has its uses, it's just pretty useless for anything where there's any sort of argument or vested interest.
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Re:What can T-Rays do? (Score:5, Informative)
1) They can penetrate through clothing/plastic/flesh, and most of the materials mentioned seem to be organic in nature. This gives them "X-ray"-like properties.
2) They were able to make T-Rays before in laboratories, but now they can make them more cheaply, with less power, in human-friendly settings.
3) T-Rays give off less radiation than X-rays, due to the much larger wavelength.
Quick Conclusion: We now have the potential to create an X-ray like device that could be deployed in airports and other travel hubs that could be used to monitor the public without harming the public through this observation. More benignly, they could also be used in hospitals for "persistent monitoring" of patients with tumors or internal bleeding, because they seem to have lower power requirements and risks of side-effects.
Re:What can T-Rays do? (Score:5, Informative)
So on the one hand you have visible light and infra-red which ca\n't go through anything, on the other side you have microwaves which can go a short way through a soup or frozen chicken, and in the middle you have "T-rays" which can go through clothing but not weaponry and body parts.
Not sure exactly why IR and microwaves have been so easy to generate while "T-rays" are so difficult, and I wish they'd come up with a better name than "T-ray" because technically visible light and infra-red are THz too.
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Just wait for the tech to drop to $50-500 and some one to figure out how to hook it
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We do generate it. Everything does, through black body radiation [wikipedia.org]. According to Wien's displacement law [wikipedia.org], the peak frequency for something at 300 Kelvin is about 30 THz [google.com].
For many imaging applications, though, it's more useful to "light up" something and see the reflection. Kinda like using a camera fl
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3) T-Rays give off less radiation than X-rays, due to the much larger wavelength.
It's not that they give of less radiation, it's that the radiation is non-ionizing (meaning that no photon has enough power to knock a electron free from its atoms -- that's what allows x-rays and UV to do damage). Because of how quantum mechanics works, you can blast away with as many of these photons as you like (aka, as much radiation and power as you want) and it will still be non-ionizing. It's cool stuff.
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Sorry, terahertz radiation cannot penetrate through flesh, in any manner comparable to X-ray radiation. We (our bodies) are pretty much water, when it comes down to it, and above 100 GHz, even 1 cm of water will attenuate a signal by several hundred dB. Refer to Kindt & Schmuttenmaer (1996) for the double-Debye model fit parameters.
The im
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2) Yep.
3) I did, thanks. Again, I was speaking more in the vernacular. Never got a Physics degree.
Commercially available nanotechnology (Score:1)
conversation (Score:1)
- Oh, I just demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz radiation.
- Put goggles on, pressed button, computer said "pretty coherent!", had lunch.
- Oh.. I thought you had to be clever to be a physicist..
- Nah, monkeys do this all the time.
Re:conversation (Score:4, Funny)
Second - Dang, humans have penetrated the underground ape-lab and found our laser test rig for the grand deconfibrulatex that will return us to mastery of this planet.
KILL THEM ALL!
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I say the next time scientists with the Good Equipment build the next paradigm changing weapon, keep it for yourselves and demand sanity in policy. That or just threaten to strike, taking the equipment home with you (a tall order, I know) so
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Obligatory
Oblig... (Score:2, Funny)
Article unit goof? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, with that aside, we still have to decide if this thing is a maser or a taser!
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for the geek factor alone, I'll gladly suffer the +5 redundant rightfully coming my way.
Re:Article unit goof? (Score:4, Funny)
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the t-ray phaser that renders all your opponent's clothes see through! (I am visualising one fucked up trek episode there and then, "why yes captain, let me demonstrate the effect of the new weaponry on Uhuru"..
golly, I could of done with one of those at the nightclub last week...
No unit goof (Score:4, Informative)
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In fact the summary is rather fluffy, I'll wait to read the APL
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Room Temperature Conductor of T-Rex (Score:5, Funny)
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X-Ray glasses (Score:2)
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zzzz (Score:2)
So I'll summerize some simple questions and hope there are some kindly physicists who can answer...
1. will this help me see through girls clothing? (vaporising them and providing a 1ns window of "no clothing" does not count)
2. does this provide any new interesting military technology with "cool!" factor?
3. can T-rays diagnose all illnesses and promote world peace?
4. is this anything like those airport sensors? is the world going to becom
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2. T Rays are low energy, so not much profit in trying to kill someone with them. A nice rock would work better.
3. Yes and no. They're better than X-rays for some diagnostics, but, as always, more knowledge = less peace.
4. Yes. Except they don't see through clothes (those already exist) they look through clothes and skin. They also are more effective at spotting explosives, etc, due to peculiarities in their composition.
5. This has always been the case.
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No, not their skin. Kindt & Schmuttenmaer (1996). 1 cm of water attenuates frequencies above 100 GHz by several hundred dB.
X-rays and terahertz radiation are not really competitors in the medical field, due to the fact that terahertz radiation is attenuated greatly by water, and we're mostly water. You can detect some skin conditions with it, but only those in the
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I recall that the designers of 't-ray' devices had to patch their devices to 'blur' private regions, because people were getting upset that you 'could see too much detail' with the first t-ray scanners...
making t-ray scanners 'cheaper' to build and operate will increase their use in airport sec
Room tempurature?!?!! (Score:2, Funny)
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What we REALLY need (Score:3, Insightful)
I know there are lots more applications for this, but what the health care system could really use right now is cheaper imaging technology. I'd love to see a similar breakthrough that reduced the cost of an MRI machine to about five grand.
Re:What we REALLY need (Score:4, Informative)
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I know there are lots more applications for this, but what the health care system could really use right now is cheaper imaging technology. I'd love to see a similar breakthrough that reduced the cost of an MRI machine to about five grand.
The only problem is, the cheaper the imaging, the more often it will be used.
And the more often it is used, the more completely benign stuff you'll find.
That means more follow ups, biopsies, consultations with experts, etc.
And all that has a very real possibility of raising the costs of health care.
So when you calculate the benefits, you have to calculate the cost of all the useless testing will happen and subtract that out.
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What does it cost to move to a country with nationalized medicine, anyway?
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The last estimates I saw that made a serious attempt to do an apples-to-apples comparison indicated that the Canadian system delivers roughly twice the health care dollars to the sharp end (doctors, nurses, equipment and supplies, etc.) as the American model.
That doesn't tell the whole story by any means, but it seems to indicate that the insurance companies which infest the American system are feeding very, very well.
I don't know what the "start up" cost or "changeover" cost might be. Canada made the
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T-rays for security, medicine (Score:4, Informative)
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From WP: Terahertz radiation can penetrate fabrics and plastics, so it can be used in surveillance, such as security screening, to uncover concealed weapons on a person, remotely. This is of particular interest because many materials of interest, such as plastic explosives, have unique spectral "fingerprints" in the terahertz range. This offers the possibility to combine s
Very nice. Here's the real source (Score:5, Informative)
First, here's the real paper. [harvard.edu] Actually, this is the previous paper, where they got operation at 177K, but not quite room temperature. (Don't link to Physorg; they just collect press releases, add ads, and delete the citations.)
Terahertz waves are interesting. At one time, that was an inaccessible portion of the spectrum, above radio but below infrared. Now it's understood that it's a region in which both RF and optical techniques can work. At that frequency, propagation is line of sight, although diffuse systems, as with diffuse IR, are possible. Applications are still a ways off, but there's probably something useful to do with this stuff.
Incidentally, "radio", by international agreement, ends at 3THz. Beyond that, it's "light" for regulatory purposes. In the US, FCC regulations (for RF) end at 3THz, and DHS regulations (as for lasers) begin.
The top end of what's defined as radio. (Score:2)
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ITU CVA 1005: "Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequencies arbitrarily lower than 3 000 GHz propagated without artificial guide". That's the international definition. There are currently discussions over whether this limit should be raised.
The US FCC does not currently allocate spectrum [doc.gov] above 300GHz, but there is already pressure on the FCC to act in that area.
Re:Room Temperature Semiconductor *Source* of T-Ra (Score:2)
T-rays have imaging and security applications (Score:3, Informative)
Check out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation [wikipedia.org]
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Now I can't wait until all those T-ray porn sites start appearing
MST3K Ref (Score:2)
"Well, I isolated a nucleotide today..."
Schwab
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Even Higher Frequencies Possible? (Score:4, Informative)
For example, what about using two pairs of IR lasers, each pair resonating at a slightly different beat frequency? In fact a single "reference" IR laser could be split into two sources, with two different other sources each supplying their different frequencies into a THz laser of slightly different frequency. Then use those THz sources into an semiconductor active region which resonates at the beat frequency between the THz sources.
That higher frequency result could be used as one of yet another pair, generating an even higher beat frequency. And since these steps up are made from thin film deposition, they could have such a hierarchical structure all contained in a very tiny device. Perhaps in a device at a scale that offers extremely high frequency lasers, manufactured and operating cheaply, without extra HW to maintain a useful beam.
Perhaps a beam that could offer networks petabyte datarates. And perhaps, if the optical resonance junctions can be modulated by other photons, actual logic executing quickly, at low power.
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This is purely theoretical, and I actually have no idea what I'm talking about.
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In fact the THz laser we're discussing here is generated by the beat frequency of two IR (lower frequency) lasers, which is why they're called "Quantum Cascade Lasers":
and don't forget the F-Ray (Score:2)
Come on guys, fix that headline (Score:1)
Prior art (Score:2)
Can I get Superpowers from this? (Score:2)
Ow - quit hitting me Mr. T - I would never have gone there!
Pug