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?
I remember hearing a lecture many years ago given by Seth Putterman, the researcher in this study. Unless I'm confusing him with another researcher, he claimed in the lecture that the underlying mechanisms behind static electricity were not understood. I've asked other scientist now and then but have never found anyone else who would confirm that claim.
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.
When reporting science, it's often not useful to start off with the newest thing. Doing so presumes the reader knew about the old thing, which of often not the case. Hence, the new thing is a few paragraphs in:
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.
