Posted on 07/27/2009 11:22:27 AM PDT by saganite
Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.
In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Your describing a Singularity of technological change.
Compare the results of glass in a fire and aluminum in a fire...
True, but I think it applies to a lot of singularities.
I doubt much will change in the field of buggy whips for a while since there is very little r&d going into that. Meanwhile, LED tv’s have effectively made LCD and Plazma tv’s instantly antiquated, but not yet obsolete.
Yeah! And you'll need to keep the door open for only 20 femtoseconds before there will be nothing to see.....saving lots of CO2 emissions somewhere.
If you will indulge me for a second, I’ll explain a bit further.
Some glasses (Magnesium fluoride, Calcium fluoride, fused silica) are transparent in what we call vacuum ultraviolet wavelengths (~120-300 nm, where visible light is 400-700 nm).
The region from 10-100 nm is known as extreme ultraviolet (EUV), where nothing transmits, and few materials even reflect with optical quality.
Once you get to shorter wavelengths, you get into the x-ray region, where materials again become transparent. So anything that is transparent at all in the EUV is a big discovery.
MD, who builds EUV cameras for a living
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