SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Terahertz radiation is used for security checks at airports, for medical examinations and also for quality checks in industry. However, radiation in the terahertz range is extremely difficult to generate. Scientists at TU Wien have now succeeded in developing a terahertz radiation source that breaks several records: it is extremely efficient, and its spectrum is very broad—it generates different wavelengths from the entire terahertz range. This opens up the possibility of creating short radiation pulses with extremely high radiation intensity. The new terahertz technology has now been presented in the journal Nature Communications.
More information: Anastasios D. Koulouklidis et al. Observation of extremely efficient terahertz generation from mid-infrared two-color laser filaments, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-14206-x
Journal information: Nature Communications
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:56AM (3 children)
Now we can get cooked faster at "extremely high radiation intensity" every time before boarding a flight.
I just can't wait for faster boarding checks and the ensuing skin blisters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:03AM
Snowcrash is coming true.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 21 2020, @06:57AM (1 child)
Look forward to cops and security guards wandering around scanning everyone with their handheld backscatter scanners.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Tuesday January 21 2020, @06:10PM
Not quite handheld, but they do have the vans: https://www.homelandsecurity-technology.com/projects/z-backscatter-van-zbv/ [homelandsecurity-technology.com]
NYPD has a few, supposedly used for scanning empty vehicles, probably for drugs but only they know for sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYPD_X-ray_vans [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:03AM (3 children)
I've honestly been curious about this for a long time.
We've had red, green, and blue lasers for a while now. Right? Those are THz lasers. I think there's IR as well. Given we already have it, why is there ensuing development of additional THz lasers? (This one says it's tunable throughout the range -- that's different.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:06AM (2 children)
The difference is that common obstacles to imaging like wood, clothing, etc are transparent to these frequencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:51AM (1 child)
Does red light shine through or does blue?
Visible light covers the majority of the THz range..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:59AM
You'll just have to look it up for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nishi.b on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:25AM (2 children)
I tought a laser was by definition coherent light of a single wavelenght.
This seems to be using two infrared laser beams (probably the source of the word "laser" in the title) to generate a wide spectrum of teraherz radiation (i.e. not a teraherz laser).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 21 2020, @02:41PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser [wikipedia.org]
Looks like spatial coherence is "required" to call it a laser, while temporal coherence seems to be optional. And the coherence quality will vary, so some lasers will scatter over a shorter distance than others, and the light emitted by a 375nm laser will not all be at exactly 375nm, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by nishi.b on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:29PM
Thanks for the precision, I really thought temporal coherence was necessary for a laser.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 21 2020, @09:28AM
orders of magnitude more than can be achieved with other methods. This results in exceptionally high THz energies of almost 200 µJ
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-liquids-terahertz.html :
In their experiments, they irradiated common laboratory liquids like methanol, acetone, dicholorethane, carbon disulphide and even water, with moderate energy femtosecond laser pulses, ionizing the liquid and forming long plasma channels called filaments. They measured energies as high as 50 microjoules, thousands of times larger than the energies emitted by most existing sources and 10 to 20 times larger than those produced from air.
Looks like they've massively improved on prior in-air results, but they were already inferior.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves