Professor in talks over spy machine (US security agents to discuss how the idea could be used)

Professor in talks over spy machine A new spy machine could have major implications for national security and health care.

The device, called a T-ray machine, can be used to read books without opening them, scan documents without leaving fingerprints and see through all kinds of materials.

Spy chiefs are now in talks with Professor Martyn Chamberlain about his research at the Univeristy of Durham.

They believe the machine could be used to check for weapons under clothing or at airports to search passengers or to scan lorries for drugs or illegal immigrants.

It could also have a major impact on the way cancer patients are treated, with medics able to detect tumours much earlier.

Prof Chamberlain has held a meeting with Ministry of Defence officials and US security agents to discuss how the idea could be used.

The machine uses terahertz waves, which lie between microwaves and infra-red on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Prof Chamberlain, 56, took the £8.5m project to Durham University to finish off after he was made master of a college there.

He said: "The waves can pass through a closed book but they are sensitive enough to see the writing on each page.

"I will be able to see through all kinds of materials and, unlike x-rays, terahertz release no harmful radiation. The technique has massive implications for health and security."

Prof Chamberlain, who has been working on the technology for more than 30 years, said: "This will soon be part of our everyday lives."

Read more about this here

http://www.jlab.org/news/articles/2003/terahertz.html

Terahertz radiation, also known as submicrometer radiation, is the latest frontier in the electromagnetic spectrum. Coherent sources produce electromagnetic waves extending from wavelengths of 100,000 km to 0.1 µm, but until recently the region between around 100 and 300 µm had no good coherent sources. Such terahertz waves have a range of potential applications, especially in biomedicine, where they can be used to analyze surface proteins of living tissues to provide instant ?biopsies? for diseases such as skin cancers.

Current methods of producing teraherz radiation, however, yield a limited average power of only about 1 mW. A pulse of light from a femtosecond laser, for example, can accelerate electrons to high-peak-power pulses, but the total amount of radiation from each pulse is low, and so is average power output. Now, a collaborative effort among three national laboratories? Brookhaven (Upton, NY), Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley, CA), and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Newport News VA), commonly called the Jefferson Lab? has achieved an average output of 20 W using relativistic electrons from a linear accelerator, or linac (Nature 2002, 420, 153).

The new method begins with the production of a picosecond-long pulse of electrons generated by exposing gallium arsenide to a femtosecond laser. The electrons are then fed into the 30-mlong linac at the Jefferson Lab?s free-electron laser (FEL) to boost their energy to 40 MeV. The accelerated electrons are bent by a magnetic field into a 1-m arc. As they are accelerated through this curve, they radiate in the terahertz range.

Although the number of electrons in each pulse is comparable to that produced by existing techniques, the amount of energy each electron radiates increases as the fourth power of the relativistic factor, or of the energy. For 40-MeV electrons, this means a 200,000-fold increase in power over subrelativistic electrons. With a repetition rate of 37 MHz, the Jefferson Lab?s FEL linac produces a 5-mA current and a 20-W radiation output.

The efficiency of the entire system is greatly enhanced because after the electrons radiate, they are fed back into the accelerator to decelerate them back down to 10 MeV. Thus, about threequarters of the energy of the electrons is fed back into the power supply, reducing total power input by a factor of 4.

?Of course, a 30-m-long accelerator is not a practical source for medical diagnostics,? says Gwyn P. Williams of the Jefferson Lab, one of the researchers. ?But we are currently looking at what the minimum parameters needed for adequate power are. We expect that we will be able to reduce accelerator length to 2 to 3 m and perhaps the cost to that of an MRI scanner.? The team is now working with Advanced Energy Systems (Medford, NY) to develop a compact system for commercialization.

Such a terahertz scanner could detect skin cancer on a patient without a biopsy and substitute spectral analyses for biopsies in endoscopic procedures such as colonoscopies. (Terahertz radiation does not penetrate tissue well, so it cannot probe for diseases located much below the surface.) Because terahertz radiation does penetrate cloth and paper easily, other possible applications include security scanners.

Dismissing technology you don't understand is often an error. This is real. It's just that the newspaper account is poorly written. You'll find links posted in this thread that will explain a little better.

I was ignorant in my first post #4, but I have read more on the subject as you can see in the other posts (#8 was one of the links and #10) The reason for my bashing was the line "He said: "The waves can pass through a closed book but they are sensitive enough to see the writing on each page."" I doubt that there will be a THz gadget that can discriminate text written on pages and make it possible to read a book without opening it. Poorly written newspaper articles and business proposals has killed too many ideas.

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