Ultra-intense laser blast creates true 'black metal'

"Black gold" is not just an expression anymore. Scientists at the University of Rochester have created a way to change the properties of almost any metal to render it, literally, black.
The process, using an incredibly intense burst of laser light, holds the promise of making everything from fuel cells to a space telescope's detectors more efficient--not to mention turning your car into the blackest black around.
"We've been surprised by the number of possible applications for this," says Chunlei Guo, assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester. "We wanted to see what would happen to a metal's properties under different laser conditions and we stumbled on this way to completely alter the reflective properties of metals."
The key to creating black metal is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse. The laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second. To get a grasp of that kind of speed--a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years.
During its brief burst, Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point. That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form and nanostructures--pits, globules, and strands that both dramatically increase the area of the surface and capture radiation. Some larger structures also form in subsequent blasts.
Guo's research team has tested the absorption capabilities for the black metal and confirmed that it can absorb virtually all the light that fall on it, making it pitch black.
Other similar attempts have turned silicon black, but those use a gas to produce chemically etched microstructures. Regular silicon already absorbs most of the visible light that falls on it, so the etching technique only offers about a 30 percent improvement, whereas regular metals absorb only a few percent of visible light before Guo hits them with the laser.
The huge increase in light absorption enabled by Guo's femtosecond laser processing means nearly any metal becomes extremely useful anytime radiation gathering is needed. For instance, detectors of all kinds, from space probes to light meters, could capture far more data than an ordinary metal-based detector could.
And turning a metal black without paint, scoring, or burning could easily lead to everyday uses such as replacing black paint on automobile trim, or presenting your spouse with a jet-black engagement ring.
Guo is also quick to point out that the nanostructures' remarkable increase in a metal's surface area is a perfect way to catalyze chemical reactions. Along with one of his research group members, postdoctoral student Anatoliy Vorobyev, he hopes to learn how the metal can help derive more energy from fuel cell reactions. The new process has worked on every metal Guo has tried, and since it's a property of the metal itself, there's no worry of the black wearing off.
Currently, the process is slow. To alter a strip of metal the size of your little finger easily takes 30 minutes or more, but Guo is looking at how different burst lengths, different wavelengths, and different intensities affect metal's properties. Fortunately, despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it should be relatively simple.
Despite the "wall outlet" ease of the use and the stay-cool metal, don't expect to see home-blackening kits anytime soon. "If you got your hand in the way of the focused laser beam, even though it's only firing for a few femtoseconds, it would drill a hole through your skin," says Guo. "I wouldn't recommend trying that."

Contact:
Jonathan Sherwood
jonathan.sherwood@rochester.edu
585-273-4726
University of Rochester

Iraq conflict passes WWII

THEY were America's days of infamy, 60 years apart - Pearl Harbour and September 11. The first led the US into World War II, a conflict it endured for 1348 days; the second was followed by a war that from tomorrow will have lasted even longer.
America's involvement in Iraq will reach that milestone at a time when the clamour for withdrawal has never been louder, and the possibility of achieving it has never seemed so difficult. The decisive end of World War II in 1945 delivers no lessons that could be applied to a very different war in a very different era.
If anything, things seem to be getting worse, the options less appealing. Baghdad is reeling from the deadliest assault on Iraqi civilians since the start of the US invasion in March 2003. At least 200 people died and more than 250 were injured after six car bombs, mortar attacks and missiles battered the Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City.
Plumes of black smoke and anguished screams rose above a chaotic landscape of flames and charred cars, witnesses said.
Violence later spread to other neighbourhoods in retaliatory attacks across Baghdad, even as politicians and senior religious clerics appealed for calm.
The Iraqi Government locked down the capital with an indefinite curfew and shut the airport to commercial flights.
It is a long way from Mission Accomplished - the banner that decorated a US aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003 as the US President, George Bush, proclaimed the end of "major combat operations". Forty-four months on, Americans still count the cost of the war: more than 2860 US soldiers dead, more than 21,000 injured.
Those figures do not compare with US casualties in World War II, when 406,000 American soldiers died and 671,000 were wounded. But the Iraq campaign has become a symbol of the pitfalls of a new style of conflict - a war against an ill-defined enemy with no end in sight.
American politicians have not failed to note the symbolism of the milestone.
The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, pointed to it as he pushed for a phased withdrawal within four to six months.
"We are 3 years into a conflict which has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict and almost as long as World War II. We should put the responsibility for Iraq's future squarely where it belongs: on the Iraqis."
In Canberra, the Prime Minister, John Howard, acknowledged Iraq was "going through a bad phase" and that nobody was "other than horrified at the continued loss of life". Mr Howard said any change in the role of Australia's troops would depend on "what's involved in any possible British reduction" of its commitment.
"We haven't agreed to anything else and if there are any proposals that we do something differently, well they will have to be assessed on their merits and according to our judgement as to whether it's appropriate."

Exemption saves man jail time

BANGOR -- A Fairfield man has been granted a reduction on his prison sentence on gun charges in federal court because of an exemption to hunters and outdoorsman.
Instead of serving more than 3 years in a federal prison, Steven Lemieux, 42, of Covell Road, was sentenced last week to 8 months in jail, with about four months already served.
Lemieux was convicted in state court on a charge of domestic assault in 2004. The assault did not involve use of a firearm, but according to federal law, anyone convicted of a crime of domestic violence is prohibited from possessing a firearm.
Lemieux's lawyer Donald Brown of Brewer said a sporting use exception was appropriate because all of his client's firearms were related to sport shooting or target practice.
"It's not rare in Maine to be an issue, but it's used only for people who possess guns for sporting," Brown said. "Even a felon or in a case of domestic violence, the sporting purpose exception can be used to say 'We're going to give you a little bit of a break here.'"
In 2004, Lemieux was convicted of domestic violence.
In 2005, state agents, acting on tips that he still had weapons in his house , searched the place and seized nine guns. All but one of the guns were firearms used for hunting or target shooting. He was sentenced to 77 days in jail.
This February, a federal grand jury in Bangor indicted Lemieux, charging that he lied twice -- once while on state probation -- on federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives transaction record forms, which he filled out trying to buy a .45-caliber pistol from Jim's Gun Shop on Bay Street in Winslow.
The question in federal court was whether Lemieux was entitled to the sporting use reduction in his sentence because he was on state probation when he tried to buy the gun at the Winslow shop. The U.S. Attorney's office said he was not entitled to it.
The judge disagreed.
Lemieux was found guilty of falsifying federal firearm forms in April after a one-day jury trial.
Brown said that under federal sentencing guidelines, Lemieux faced between 32 and 48 months in prison. With the hunter's exception, the guideline calls for a sentence of 0 to 8 months of incarceration.
In his ruling dated last week, U.S District Judge John Woodcock Jr. wrote that the sporting purpose reduction is "curious" since it reduces the prison time on possession of a firearm for lawful sporting purposes for a defendant convicted of illegal possession of a firearm.
In applying the sporting exemption, Woodcock had to consider the number and type of firearms in Lemieux's possession, the amount and type of ammunition, the actual use and location of the guns, his criminal history and to what extent possession of firearms was prohibited.
The judge found that Lemieux was a hunting enthusiast and that there was no history of criminal use of guns.
The federal statute reducing the sentence can not apply to people convicted of drug offenses or crimes of violence or those found to be in possession of illegal short-barreled shotguns.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel Casey declined to comment on the case.

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Michigan teen creates nuclear fusion

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich., Nov. 19 (UPI) --
An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion -- combining atoms to create energy.
The Detroit Free Press reported that 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.
Nuclear fusion is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," Olson told the Free Press.
Olson's machine consists of a vacuum that sucks air out, and then deuterium -- a form of hydrogen -- is injected into the vacuum. He then charges electricity into the vacuum, causing the atoms in the center to be attracted to one another, creating nuclear fusion.
Olson -- who wants to work for the federal government, as his grandfather did -- is an otherwise typical teen, the newspaper said. He is on the track team at Stoney Creek High School and plans to go to college.

Big magnet ready to face the big questions of the universe

World's largest superconducting magnet switches on

The largest superconducting magnet ever built has successfully been powered up to its operating conditions at the first attempt. Called the Barrel Toroid because of its shape, this magnet is a vital part of ATLAS, one of the major particle detectors being prepared to take data at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator scheduled to turn on in November 2007. ATLAS will help scientists probe the big questions of the Universe – what happened in the moments after the Big Bang? Why does the material in the Universe behave the way it does? Why is the Universe we can see made of matter rather than anti-matter?
UK scientists are a key part of the ATLAS collaboration and Dr Richard Nickerson, UK ATLAS project leader, who is from the University of Oxford welcomed this important milestone "The toroidal magnets are critical to enabling us to measure the muons (a type of particle) produced in interactions. These are vital to a lot of the physics we want to study, so the successful test of the magnets is a great step forward."

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid consists of eight superconducting coils, each in the shape of a round-cornered rectangle, 5m wide, 25m long and weighing 100 tonnes, all aligned to millimetre precision. It will work together with other magnets in ATLAS to bend the paths of charged particles produced in collisions at the LHC, enabling important properties to be measured. Unlike most particle detectors, the ATLAS detector does not need large quantities of metal to contain the field because the field is contained within a doughnut shape defined by the coils. This allows the ATLAS detector to be very large, which in turn increases the precision of the measurements it can make.

At 46m long, 25m wide and 25m high, ATLAS is the largest volume detector ever constructed for particle physics. Among the questions ATLAS will focus on are why particles have mass, what the unknown 96% of the Universe is made of, and why Nature prefers matter to antimatter. Some 1800 scientists from 165 universities and laboratories (including 12 from the UK) representing 35 countries are building the ATLAS detector and preparing to take data next year.

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid was first cooled down over a six-week period in July-August to reach –269oC. It was then powered up step-by-step to higher and higher currents, reaching 21 thousand amps for the first time during the night of 9 November. This is 500 amps above the current needed to produce the nominal magnetic field. Afterwards, the current was switched off and the stored magnetic energy of 1.1 GJ, the equivalent of about 10 000 cars travelling at 70km/h, has now been safely dissipated, raising the cold mass of the magnet to –218oC.

"We can now say that the ATLAS Barrel Toroid is ready for physics," said Herman ten Kate, ATLAS magnet system project leader.

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid is financed by the ATLAS Collaboration and has been built through close collaboration between the French CEA-DAPNIA laboratory (originator of the magnet's design), Italy's INFN-LASA laboratory and CERN. Components have been contributed in-kind by national funding agencies from industries in France (CEA), Italy, Germany (BMBF), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), an international organization based near Moscow. The final integration and test of the coils at CERN, as well as assembly of the toroid in the ATLAS underground cavern, was done with JINR providing most of the manpower and heavy tooling.

###

Notes for Editors

Images

Pictures of the Barrel Toroid Magnet can be downloaded from http://atlasexperiment.org/atlas_photos/toroid/toroid_barrel.html

The 8 elements of the magnet are clearly visible in the picture of the ATLAS detector.

Contacts

Dr Richard Nickerson

University of Oxford

Tel +44 1865 273318

r.nickerson1@physics.ox.ac.uk

James Gillies

CERN press office

Tel. +41 22 767 41 01

James.Gillies@cern.ch

InterAction Collaboration media contacts:

• Fermilab, USA: Kurt Riesselmann, 630-840-3351, kurtr@fnal.gov
  
• INFN, Italy: Barbara Gallavotti, + 39 06 6868162 (office), + 39 335 6606075 (cell phone), + 39 06 6868162 (fax), Barbara.Gallavotti@presid.infn.it
  
• KEK, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan: Youhei Morita, + 81 029 8796047, + 81 029 8796049 (fax), youhei.morita@kek.jp
  
• IN2P3-CNRS, France: Alain de Bellefon, + 33 01 44 96 47 51, bellefon@in2p3.fr
  
• Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia: Boris Starchenko, + 7 096 221 6 38 24, irinak@jinr.ru
  
• Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), United Kingdom: Peter Barratt, + 44 (0) 1793 442025, + 44 (0) 787 602 899 (mobile), peter.barratt@pparc.ac.uk
  
  
  
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA: Ron Kolb, + 1 510 486 7586, rrkolb@lbl.gov
  
  

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the UK's strategic science investment agency. It funds research, education and public understanding in four areas of science - particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and space science.

PPARC is government funded and provides research grants and studentships to scientists in British universities, gives researchers access to world-class facilities and funds the UK membership of international bodies such as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the European Space Agency. It also contributes money for the UK telescopes overseas on La Palma, Hawaii, Australia and in Chile, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, which includes the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank observatory.

Highspeed video of a exploding light bulb

Slowmotion film recorded with a Redlake HG-100k at 5000fps and 640x480 pixels.

24 Rules for Gun Fighting...

1. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.
2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss.
4. If your shooting stance is good, you're probably not moving fast enough nor using cover correctly.
5. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movement are preferred.)
6. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.
7. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
8. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.
9. Accuracy is relative: most combat shooting standards will be more dependent on "pucker factor" than the inherent accuracy of the gun.
10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
11. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
12. Have a plan.
13. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won't work.
14. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
15. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.
16. Don't drop your guard.
17. Always tactical load and threat scan 360 degrees.
18. Watch their hands. Hands kill. In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see them.
19. Decide to be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH.
20. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.
21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
22. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
23. Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.
24. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a "4."