Scotch tape found to emit x-rays by behaving like a particle accelerator
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
Doesnt this mean that Scotch tape users are frequently subject to radiation exposure?
From the article:
No need to worry about radiation exposure at the office — at atmospheric pressure, where air molecules bustle, the electrons quickly run into other particles before they can radiate X-rays.
Do people really just read the title and then post a comment? Why?
The idea is that by rubbing a balloon on your head, you add energy of a fraction of an electron volt to each electron on average, yet you can generate potential difference of 1000s of volts, so how does the diffuse energy input get concentrated to the small fraction of electrons at the high potential. Someday I'd like to hear an expert explanation.
To track where the X-rays travel, Australian scientists rigged up Scotch tape on a spool driven by a motor (the lab’s first prototype spun on an electric drill). The X-rays mostly sprayed at a right angle to the direction the tape was pulled, the researchers report in the Sept. 29 Applied Physics Letters. That’s a convenient property, because herding light into a straight line normally absorbs the light’s energy, but the tape naturally emits X-rays in a straight line to within 5 degrees.
“Tape is an even better use as an X-ray source than we thought,” says Putterman, who first observed the phenomenon and reported in May that bremsstrahlung radiation is the X-ray source in a May paper in Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics.
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