Scotch tape xrays.

Muzzoid

http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/

Holy crap that is cool...


Now how do i build me a vaccum chamber...




...... perhaps that isnt the best idea actually.

Tumerboy

god damn that's amazing.

TheWinterLord

cool step forward.

|Buddy|

Awesome.

I wonder what does Toilet Paper generate, i sure drag it faster than 5cm per second!

Muzzoid

buddy i would be worried if you use toilet paper with adhesive on it... sounds painful...

fast1

haha gosh... imagining it is also painful lol

Joshua Stubbles

What freaks me out actually, is the fact that the geiger counter went nuts on it. How many normal-day things do we interact with are tossing off high levels of radiation like that?? It might not be such a mystery to think things like this could be a factor in the increased rates of cancer in developed nations (about 1 in 4 people die from cancer in the US).
Granted, it's really not a lot of radiation. But it's enough to take an xray. Now extrapolate that over the thousands of objects you've interacted with, over years of time. That's a lot of radiation.

Muzzoid

well its not like you get blasted by xrays everytime to use your tape. its got to be in a vacuum, otherwise it wont do anything. SO i wouldnt worry about it, unless you live in a vaccuum.

Tumerboy

I'm screwed.

Slum

I read about this stuff a few years ago. It's really awesome to see people studying it fully.

pior

It's so cool to see that they have absolutely no idea why this is happening!!!
Sweet!

Joshua Stubbles

Muzz wrote: »

well its not like you get blasted by xrays everytime to use your tape. its got to be in a vacuum, otherwise it wont do anything. SO i wouldnt worry about it, unless you live in a vaccuum.

True, but that's simply scotch tape. I'm sure larger objects toss off considerably more particles in a non-inert atmosphere. I wasn't trying to say scotch tape is going to kill ya, just that things like this might (over years and years of our lives) sink enough extra radiation into us to cause cell mutations and cancer. One in four deaths in the U.S is caused by cancer - that's pretty damn scary. It's gotten worse as our technological prowess has increased, so I don't think it's something that can be dismissed right away.

Either way, it's entirely cool to know this stuff. I never knew simply things like wrapping presents is tossing xrays around. Nifty.

Dazzer13

Hey looks and sounds cool, but is any sure this wasn't an april fools.

I got sucker by the Iwantoneofthose website. Really want to gett he iris

Vailias

Vassago: The tape doesn't generate xray's under normal circumstances. It simply has an electrical charge difference. Normally the atmosphere (air, this mix of gasses we all live in) soaks up almost all the available free electrons generated from phenomena such as this, just drag your socks on a carpet, its the same thing. The face of these surfaces does hold charge a bit longer, as you'll find if you shock yourself or as you see how that tape attracted to the guy's hand early on in the video.

Now something to note about ionization. At the atomic level it is the atoms of a substance gaining or losing an electron (or several), Substances don't tend to stay charged though, and when the charge difference from an atom's ground state is high enough, the electrons will spontaneously shift to a lower energy state, closer to ground, and emit a photon of a wavelength commensurate with the charge difference. This is why neon tubes work, why you can see lightning, and numerous other glowie phenomena. In the case of this sticky tape the charge difference is allowed or rather forced to grow to a much higher state by its isolation than under normal conditions, so the emitted photons are xrays rather than visible light.

The mechanics of WHY there is such a charge differential is what's really amazing/puzzling. I'd be curious to know what would happen if you managed to rub some fur under a vacuum. This whole boundary interaction thing is really interesting. If they solve this I wouldn't be surprised if it forms the basis to a bridge between quantum mechanics and relativistic classical mechanics.

Steve Schulze

I'm not Mr Physics Guy here, so forgive my complete ignorance. We're getting a lot of power for not much cost, right? If this sort of thing was developed and extrapolated to the Nth degree, could it have any potential for generating power? In a few years are we going to ditch the nuclear power plants and run the world on duct-tape?

Vailias

Jackablade: No there's very little power. There is a very large voltage difference, on an atomic scale anyway, with extremely low amperage, and the conversion back to ground state is happening very quickly.

They mention in the video getting 60 kilovolt xrays out of the tape.. If my understanding is correct that's an xray photon created from a charge difference of 60KeV. To put that into perspective the energy released by a snowflake hitting concrete is 4MeV (4000KeV). (thank you wikipedia for the eV table)

Normal xray generation takes a lot of power due to the method by which they are generated. Most of the energy put into the xray flashbulb is lost as heat. Standard xray bulbs work much like a normal lightbulb, except they generate an electron flux just like this tape does.
"Tungsten cathode at one end heated to around 2000 °C emits electrons through thermionic emission. In a sense, the electrons boil off of the metal surface. But it's a weird kind of "boiling" since the electrons can never evaporate away. They are always replaced by new ones. If they weren't we'd wind up with a huge positive charge on the metal surface." - http://hypertextbook.com/physics/modern/x-ray/

Edit: also, For what its worth the potential difference involved in a static shock between your finger and a doorknob (or other metal object) are normally over 5000 volts, some up to or over 15000. Most sites say you don't even feel discharges less than 4000 volts.