God is Light

God is Light

or replacing one mystery with another!

The Enduring Mystery of Light

By Michael Schirber
Special to LiveScience
posted: 26 February 2007
09:14 am ET

Is it a wave?

What ties together microwaves, X-rays and the colors of the rainbow is that they are all waves—electromagnetic waves to be exact. The substance that sloshes back and forth isn't water or air, but a combination of electric and magnetic fields
Or is it a particle?

But waves are not the whole story. Light is composed of particles called photons. This is most obvious with higher energy light, like X-rays and gamma rays, but it is true all the way down to radio waves.
Albert Einstein deciphered the mystery in 1905 by assuming that particles of light smacked into the electrons, like colliding billiard balls. Only particles from short wavelength light can give a hard enough kick.

Despite this success, the particle theory never replaced the wave theory, since only waves can describe how light interferes with itself when it passes through two slits. We therefore have to live with light being both a particle and a wave—sometimes acting as hard as a rock, sometimes as soft as a ripple.

Instead of worrying about what light is, it might be better to concentrate on what light does. Light shakes, twists and shoves the charged particles (like electrons) that reside in all materials.

These light actions are wavelength-specific. Or to say it another way, each material responds only to a particular set of wavelengths.



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Dueling

News - Coming Soon From DuPont: Advances in ...
... With proper dispersion, small amounts of a new DuPont nanomaterial called DNM in
a polymer can produce substantial property improvements, according to Dr. Rao. ...


Intel, IBM Unveil New Transistors
Hafnium-based materials will be incorporated in 45-nm-technology chips
Alex Tullo

IN DUELING ANNOUNCEMENTS that mark the culmination of years of research efforts, Intel and IBM say they are using hafnium-based dielectric insulating materials to construct the transistors in their next-generation 45-nm-technology chips.

Silicon dioxide has been the transistor dielectric material of choice for about 40 years. As chip size has continued to shrink, the SiO2 layer has been made thinner and thinner to maintain adequate capacitance. In the most advanced chips in production today, which have 65-nm circuit lines, the SiO2 layer is only 1.2 nm thick.
Intel
Test wafer for a 45-nm-technology chip uses hafnium.

But according to David Lammers, director of the WeSrch.com networking website for semiconductors—part of the semiconductor market research firm VLSI Research—a layer any thinner is prone to heat-generating electron tunneling. "You want a thinner electrical thickness, but you don't want all the current leakage and heat," he says.
A day after Intel's announcement, IBM said it had successfully made transistors with a hafnium-based high-k and metal combination with partners Advanced Micro Devices, Sony, and Toshiba.
How Evaporating Carbon Nanotubes Retain Their Perfection?

Feng Ding, Kun Jiao, Yu Lin, and Boris I. Yakobson*

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Department of Chemistry, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005

Received November 24, 2006

Revised January 27, 2007

Abstract:

We present a mechanism of high-temperature sublimation of carbon nanotubes that does not destroy their ordered makeup even upon significant loss of mass. The atoms depart to the gas phase from the pentagon-heptagon dislocation cores, while the bond disruption is immediately repaired, and the 57 seamlessly propagate through the lattice. This explains a broad class of unsettled phenomena when at high temperature or under radiation the nanotubes do not become amorphous but rather shrink in size nearly flawlessly.
Well,the connection with small business?

In 1959 the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, in his visionary lecture entitled "There's plenty of room at the bottom", proposed the development of technology to function at the cellular and even the molecular level. Among other things he said, "...it would be interesting in surgery if you could
swallow the surgeon". This is precisely the plot of the 1966 film
'The Fantastic Voyage', made into a novel by Isaac Asimov, in which a submarine containing a medical team is shrunk and injected into a patient to perform a life saving operation. While Hollywood has to suspend the laws of physics, Feynman's proposals were based solidly on those very laws.

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Artificial Atoms

"Pompeian red is really special. It represents the height of the ancient Romans’ mastery in making colors," said Daniela Daniele, a researcher at Berlin's State Museum. That unique quality makes it all the more important to learn how to preserve Pompeii’s brilliant red pigment.
They used an unusually fine grind (2~3 µm), which makes the pigment’s color more intense. They also mixed in larger crystals 10~15 µm, which gave a shiny quality to the surface. Cinnabar that is processed in the typical way yields a dull red similar to red ochre.

Artificial Atoms

Jim_Kling

Image Courtesy: PlasmaChem GmbH, Berlin, Germany

Spherical particles of a few thousand atoms " known as nanoparticles " have been used as artificial atoms to create larger crystals that could find use in a variety of applications, such as nanoparticle-based transistors or wave guides for use in biosensors, or as computer components.

Nanoparticles are often coated with rod-like molecules to prevent further growth or agglomeration. This 'ligand shell' can be made to react with other molecules and link up with other nanoparticles to form polymers, but it does so with no particular preference the resulting structures tend to be amorphous. Nanoparticles would be even more useful if researchers could get them to assemble in a directed manner.

Francesco Stellacci and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team synthesized gold nanoparticles and used a combination of 1-nonanethiol and 4-methylbenzenethiol as the ligand surface. They then used a two phase polymerization reaction inspired by the procedure to synthesize nylon. The nanoparticles were first exposed to a solution of 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid to form disulfide bonds with the 1-nonanethiol, leaving the carboxylic acid group from 1-nonanethiol protruding into space. They predicted that the polar 1-nonanethiol residues would be the first to react with the 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid, so that when the reaction was quenched it would yield nanoparticles with two modified poles. They then treated the mixture with a 1,6-diaminohexane and an activating agent to form amide bonds that would link the resulting carboxylic acid residue to the carboxylic acid residue hanging off of another nanoparticle.

Transmission electron microscopy images of the resulting precipitate revealed linear nanoparticle chains and no sign of aggregates. The particles formed films as large as 1 cm² and up to 60 microns thick. Such films have the potential to be used as nano-waveguides for use in biosensors. Linked nanoparticles transfer light in a characteristic way, and this can be altered when they are bound to a biological molecule. This change can be used to sense the molecule's presence.


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