X Rays From Peeling Tape

[Tishatang]

Hi All

Interesting science news story.

Sticky tape generates X-rays : Nature News

Click on video link in story.

Tishatang

[Sephiroth]

interesting read

A few things come to mind like Tom's explaination of Lee and Yang's experiments with the spontanious emittion around a dipole.

Also the Testatika. If the surface area of the plates on a capacitor is decreased the voltage rises.

So if we apply these to the roll of cellotape, when the tape is unraveled it reduces the surface area of the "plates" and so the voltage increases (to very high levels apparently!) The tape isn't conductive so we are only dealing with static charges that are local to where the tape joins back onto the roll. This seperation of charges creates our source dipole where the field around it is pulling energy from the vacuum from all around it and emitting it into the real world as photons.

The sticky-tape X-ray machine is also baffling others in the field. "You wouldn't have thought that so much of the mechanical energy would come out as X-rays," says Ken Suslick, an expert in mechanoluminescence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The adhesive on the tape is an amorphous liquid, not crystalline. What's causing the transfer of charge, of electrons or protons, what the accepting and donor groups are — these things are much less clear."

Because the energy of the emitted X-Rays is independant of the mechanical work! I wonder how efficient the generation of X-Rays would be compared to the mechanical work if a roll of cellulose was used without the adhesive.