Physicists Have Created the Brightest Light Ever Recorded (vice.com) 96
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.
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Re: UNL sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
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It isn't because the school supports raping children. But because if they kept it quiet this guy brings a lot of money and fame to the school.
For the most part the most respected members of society, can easily be protected by their institutions for any wrongs that they do.
We saw this with the Catholic Priest, Boy Scout troop leaders, Bill Cosby
when ever there are people who are respected as being the best of us, we don't want to realize that they are flawed individuals as well. However the society protect
Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
Now it is possible to play the original gameboy advance!
A minor detail... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Exactly, what rubbish. (Score:3)
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
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Er, they're talking about X-ray imaging, not laser imaging. The high brightness laser causes electrons to emit X-rays, and it's those X-rays that are of interest. The electrons absorb multiple photons from the laser and emit a single X-ray photon which combines their energy, so the X-ray beam is not nearly as bright as the laser beam.
Ergo, your rubbishing of their claim is rubbish. I mean even if you didn't RTFA they talk about X-rays in the summary.
Improved Airport Security (Score:3)
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.
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Tissue sample? Removed from the patient?
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Wait, is this deja-vu? (Score:4, Interesting)
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... [arxiv.org]
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?
Re:Wait, is this deja-vu? (Score:5, Informative)
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Thank you for that description.
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In this experiment they are basically jamming up the valence shells with photon wavepacket energy - the valence shells do not have time to "discharge" the energy before getting hit again, so they get overloaded in a sense.
I don't know enough physics to tell if that's a really great "layman's terms" explanation, or if it's Star Trek bullshit.
Re: Wait, is this deja-vu? (Score:2)
Not Star Trek â" Babylon 5. Valen spent time in a shell.
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What you describe is almost right. Yes, laser photons scatter with electrons to generate x-ray photons, but the process is Compton scattering, not harmonics generation. The electrons are laser wakefield-accelerated (i.e. free) electrons of about 55 MeV kinetic energy (yes, capital M) , not valence electrons.
Compton scattering analog would be playing billiard with electrons an photons: You can transfer energy from electrons to photons. In this case you take a fat high-energy (moving) electron and hit that wi
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Your prior work is theory. This work is experimental. And no, it doesn't reach Schwinger limit - they don't even try since they don't focus the entire primary laser pulse into one spot. Moreover, UNL's Diocles laser has "only" 100TW peak power, more than a factor 10 below today's state-of-the-art.
The goal here was to generate short intense x-ray pulses with (relatively) narrow spectral bandwidth.
Your theory article cites the ELI project as one that would be capable of (maybe) generating intensities four ord
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By using an electric field, in this case a photon.
Look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
section Compton scattering applies to this article.
Basically, hitting electrons with other things is the bread and butter of high energy physics.
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Huh? (Score:1)
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?
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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 und
A likely story (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty sure the blue LED on the front of my stereo is brighter.
Re:A likely story (Score:5, Funny)
The screen on my cell phone...at 06:00 am is easily the brightest object in the universe.
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Actually, by your definition, yes. Their x-ray pulses have a rather low number of photons (about a million per shot). However, physicists use a different definition for brightness: http://scienceworld.wolfram.co... [wolfram.com]
and
https://www.rp-photonics.com/s... [rp-photonics.com]
That definition basically translates to "lots of light in one direction and in a narrow spectral range, per unit time" - squeezing the light in every imaginable way to make it as well-defined/focused as possible. This makes your LED lose in a lot of ways: becaus
Just how bright is it? (Score:3)
Lack of Imagination (Score:2, Insightful)
Physicists Have Created the Brightest Light Ever Recorded
Bright light changing appearance (Score:2)
First use (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
When you're the blinded driver, just aim for the bright spot. At least you know it's somewhere on the road, and the BMW driver can see well enough to maneuver around you.
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The HID lights on my BMW adjust their level as soon as I start the car. The HID lights on my old Acura TL did not. When I had the Acura I constantly got hit with the high beams from oncoming drivers if I had even one person sitting in back. In over 10 years it has not happened once with my BMW.
Probably because the HIDs in your Acura were mis-aligned... My old Murano had HIDs which could be adjusted up and down using a wheel switch. Never had anyone flash me when I drove it.
Yay new tech (Score:1)
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.
Definitions? (Score:2)
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...
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Not more photons. See https://www.rp-photonics.com/s... [rp-photonics.com]
and http://scienceworld.wolfram.co... [wolfram.com] for their definition.
They get a peak brightness of about 10^19 photons s^-1 mm^-2 mrad^-2 (per 0.1% bandwidth) at 1 MeV photon energy. Peak means at the peak of a 30fs short pulse.
Cat toy (Score:2)
No cat will resist this new generation of laser pointers.
Isn't this just multiphoton absorption? (Score:2)
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 absorb
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TFA warps facts beyond recognition. You need to read the Arxiv preprint article (linked in another post) to figure out what's actually going on:
There are two processes: Electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies (50-300 MeV, variable) by laser wakefield acceleration using most of the laser beam. Google that - there lots of interesting material.
The other part of the laser beam is sent around the other way and hits those high energy electrons more-or-less head on and they undergo a Compton scattering
I thought for sure... (Score:1)
overflow (Score:1)
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.
Arxiv Link (Score:1)
Link to preprint: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/Com... [unl.edu]
Diocles laser homepage: http://www.unl.edu/diocles/dio... [unl.edu]
toast (Score:1)
Sounds like using a toaster to electrocute yourself in a bathtub.
You would think there would be a better application for that.