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I'm sure many of you saw this on Slashdot, but to those who don't read there regularly:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27323869/
From the article:
NEW YORK - Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.
It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers
...
In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.
That's where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.
So is this a health hazard for unsuspecting tape-peelers?
Escobar noted that no X-rays are produced in the presence of air. You need to work in a vacuum — not exactly an everyday situation.
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So, how did this become a thesis idea for a graduate student? Is he going to get a Ph.D on the dissertation topic of "Spontaneous X-Ray Emission from Separation of Layers of Normal Scotch(tm) Tape"? Just amazing what cool things can happen with everyday stuff.
And Scotch tape is getting more scientific every day apparently. Background to my story: Graphene is a monolayer of carbon (think taking a carbon nanotube, slicing it, and unrolling it into a sheet; or, taking the layers of graphite, and instead of having many layers stacked together, it's just one sheet. It's literally a 1 atom thick sheet of atoms, as close to a 2-D object as we're likely to ever see).
Where Scotch tape comes in, is that graphene was first isolated and observed using Scotch tape. They literally just stick the tape to a piece of graphite, and peel it back off. When it comes off, it will pull carbon with it. Not just monolayers, but monolayers, double sheets, triple sheets, and bigger sections. So you take the tape, with the carbon stuck to it, and put it in a microscope (TEM, AFM, STM) and go looking for the pieces of carbon that came off that are only 1 atom thick, and those sections are graphene. Now, they have slightly better ways of making it (a little more technical to explain), but many people working on it still use the Scotch tape method because it's so quick and easy. Just a piece of tape and graphite, and throw it in your microscope and with time and luck, you'll have several little samples of graphene to work with.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27323869/
From the article:
NEW YORK - Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.
It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers
...
In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.
That's where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.
So is this a health hazard for unsuspecting tape-peelers?
Escobar noted that no X-rays are produced in the presence of air. You need to work in a vacuum — not exactly an everyday situation.
---------------------------------------------
So, how did this become a thesis idea for a graduate student? Is he going to get a Ph.D on the dissertation topic of "Spontaneous X-Ray Emission from Separation of Layers of Normal Scotch(tm) Tape"? Just amazing what cool things can happen with everyday stuff.
And Scotch tape is getting more scientific every day apparently. Background to my story: Graphene is a monolayer of carbon (think taking a carbon nanotube, slicing it, and unrolling it into a sheet; or, taking the layers of graphite, and instead of having many layers stacked together, it's just one sheet. It's literally a 1 atom thick sheet of atoms, as close to a 2-D object as we're likely to ever see).
Where Scotch tape comes in, is that graphene was first isolated and observed using Scotch tape. They literally just stick the tape to a piece of graphite, and peel it back off. When it comes off, it will pull carbon with it. Not just monolayers, but monolayers, double sheets, triple sheets, and bigger sections. So you take the tape, with the carbon stuck to it, and put it in a microscope (TEM, AFM, STM) and go looking for the pieces of carbon that came off that are only 1 atom thick, and those sections are graphene. Now, they have slightly better ways of making it (a little more technical to explain), but many people working on it still use the Scotch tape method because it's so quick and easy. Just a piece of tape and graphite, and throw it in your microscope and with time and luck, you'll have several little samples of graphene to work with.
Now, lets see if Duct-tape emits gamma rays. ;D
