About two years ago, I was speculating about the never ending but rapidly progressing process of humanity gaining control (mastery) of information, light, energy, magnetism, and matter. (ILEMM control) I would also add another L for life referring to synthetic life, genomic, protenomics, epigenomics and control of stem cells and other cells. So ILLEMM control. Although life could be considered a mix of information, matter and energy. I believe that the advance in knowledge and the way that these gains are interacting is profound. It is the accelerating technology discussed by Kurzweil. However, I think it is possible to make projections as to where this progress will lead in a more detailed way.
I believe that superconductors and progress to room temperature superconductors is moving faster than I had believed. Having whole new families of superconducting material edges and having the tools to analyze effects at the nanoscale in size and at smaller slices of time [more powerful femtosecond lasers and optical clocks with accuracy to 10**-16 and 10*-17 seconds.. More on the improving accuracy of clocks.]
The improving tools for analysis and the increasing number of examples to be studied appears to be leading to an actual understanding of the true nature of the superconducting effect. There has also been the uncovering of an entirely new effect "superinsulation" which is the opposite of superconductance
There has been the resist confirmation and physical realization of a new basic circuit element, the memristor. This new element is added to the other three the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element.
New states of matter are being discovered as frequently as when the periodic table of chemicals was being expanded a few decades ago.
Radically new things are being done with sound to create hypersound and acoustic lasers.
I will be adding other highlights major highlights to this article.
FURTHER READING
Peizoresistance effect that is ten times larger than in the past at room temperature for better motion detectors.
Showing posts with label attosecond laser. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attosecond laser. Show all posts
May 09, 2008
Tracking progress to controlling light, life and matter
November 16, 2007
New method to manipulate light a million times more efficiently
The team, led by Dr Fetah Benabid, reports on the discovery, which relates to the emerging attotechnology, the ability to send out pulses of light that last only an attosecond, a billion billionth of a second.
It is 1000 times shorter than a femtosecond. Short pulse lasers are a very interesting and emerging tool for science and technology They can destroy viruses and bacteria. They can vaporize matter without heat and be used for precise micromachining
These pulses are so brief that they allow researchers to more accurately measure the movement of sub-atomic particles such as the electron, the tiny negatively-charged entity which moves outside the nucleus of an atom. Attosecond technology may throw light, literally, upon the strange quantum world where such particles have no definite position,only probable locations.
To make attosecond pulses, researchers create a broad spectrum of light from visible wavelengths to x-rays through an inert gas. This normally requires a gigawatt of power, which puts the technique beyond any commercial or industrial use.
Dr Benabid’s team used a photonic crystal fibre (pcf), the width of a human hair, which traps light and the gas together in an efficient way. Until now the spectrum produced by photonic crystal fibre has been too narrow for use in attosecond technology, but the team have now produced a broad spectrum, using what is called a Kagomé lattice, using about a millionth of the power used by non-pcf methods.
Tthe team makes use of the fact that light can exist in different ‘modes’ without strongly interacting. This creates a situation whereby light can be trapped inside the fibre core without the need of photonic bandgap. Physicists call these modes bound states within a continuum.
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