Nano racing Car: Vienna University

This racing car is the size of a grain of sand. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology used a 3D printer with nano precision to break the world record for fastest two-photon lithography.

The technique sees liquid resin hardened by a laser beam.

The focal point of the laser beam is guided through the resin by movable mirrors, and leaves behind a line of solid polymer, just a few hundred nanometres wide.

This high resolution enables the creation of intricately structured sculptures as tiny as a grain of sand...Picture: TU Wien / Rex Features

LAMIS: A Green Chemistry Alternative for Remote-Controlled Laser Spectroscopy

LAMIS uses the energy of a high-powered laser beam to ablate a tiny spot on a sample, creating a plasma plume for spectroscopic analysis that reveals chemical elements and their isotopes. 

(Image courtesy of Applied Spectra, Inc.)

At some point this year, after NASA's rover Curiosity has landed on Mars, a laser will fire a beam of infrared light at a rock or soil sample.

This will "ablate" or vaporise a microgram-sized piece of the target, generating a plume of ionised gas or plasma, which will be analysed by spectrometers to identify the target's constituent elements.

Future Mars rovers, however, will be able to do even more. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with Applied Spectra, Inc., have developed an advanced version of this laser technology that can also analyze a target's constituent isotopes.

This expanded capability will enable future rovers for the first time to precisely date the geological age of Martian samples.

From left, Alexander Bol'shakov, Xianglei Mao and Rick Russo are part of the research team that developed LAMIS, a green chemistry laser spectroscopy technology that can be operated across vast distances. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)

Rick Russo, a scientist with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division and a pioneer in laser ablation spectroscopy, led the development of LAMIS - for Laser Ablation Molecular Isotopic Spectrometry.

As with the earlier Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) technology being used on rover Curiosity, the basic premise is to use the energy of a high-powered laser beam focused to a tiny spot on the surface of a sample to create a plasma plume for analysis.

Each species of atoms or ions within the plasma will emit light with signature spectral emission peaks.

However, whereas LIBS only measures the optical emission spectra of atoms and ions, LAMIS measures the emission spectra of molecules and molecular ions.

This enables LAMIS to identify the specific isotopes of a chemical element within the plasma plume.

"Relative to atomic emission, molecular spectra can exhibit significantly larger isotopic shifts due to the contributions of the vibrational and rotational motion in the molecule," Russo says.

"The trick is to be patient and wait for the hot atoms and ions in the plasma to collide and merge with the ambient environment to form an oxide, or a nitride or fluoride, and then collect the molecular light emissions."

Isotopes of Strontium
Russo and his research group have been using LAMIS to study isotopes of strontium, an alkaline earth metal commonly found in geological and natural materials.

Although strontium's major isotopes are stable (strontium-90 being a notable exception), the percentage of strontium-87 will naturally increase over time as a result of the decay of radioactive rubidium.

Comparing the ratio of strontium-87 to strontium-86 is a standard tool for age dating in geochronology, oceanography and archeology. The ratio of these strontium isotopes is also used to date the origin of historic or forensic samples.

Currently, the standard means of measuring strontium isotopic ratios is by mass spectrometry technologies that involve time-consuming, labour-intensive laboratory sample dissolution work with an extensive array of instrumentation.

This sample dissolution work generates substantial chemical waste. LAMIS offers a green chemistry alternative that is faster, less expensive and can be carried out from across vast distances.

"LAMIS is not yet as sensitive or precise as mass spectrometry but unlike mass spectrometry it does not require chemical dissolution sample preparation, vacuum chambers and a laboratory infrastructure," Russo says.

"All we need is a laser beam and an optical spectrometer and we can perform real-time isotopic analyses of samples at ambient pressures and temperatures."

LAMIS represents what may be the only practical means of determining the geochronology of samples on Mars or other celestial bodies in the Solar System.

Current age estimates of such bodies suffer from uncertainties in the billions of years. That said, LAMIS also has many important applications here on Earth.

Strontium isotope ratios have been a focus in the field of medicine for both treatment and diagnostic purposes.

World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Created

Scientists from the Oxford University in the UK and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a powerful X-ray laser - the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

For the first time, this laser will allow the heating of matter up to 2 million degrees Celsius, in a controlled setting.

The researchers tested the laser on a piece of aluminum foil and created hot dense matter (or a solid plasma).

The process of heating took less than a trillionth of a second.

According to the scientists, this represents a major step forward in understanding the composition of the more extreme forms of matter found in stars and giant planets; this could also help in experiments aimed at recreating the nuclear fusion process that powers the Sun.

"The LCLS X-ray laser is a truly remarkable machine," said Sam Vinko, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University, "Making extremely hot, dense matter is important scientifically if we are ultimately to understand the conditions that exist inside stars and at the center of giant planets within our own solar system and beyond."

"The LCLS, with its ultra-short wavelengths of X-ray laser light, is the first that can penetrate a dense solid and create a uniform patch of plasma - in this case a cube one-thousandth of a centimeter on a side - and probe it at the same time," said Bob Nagler from the SLAC.

"Those 60 hours when we first aimed the LCLS at a solid were the most exciting 60 hours of my entire scientific career," said Justin Wark, also from Oxford, "LCLS is really going to revolutionize the field, in my view."

Laser first: Solves the puzzle of how the Universe got its magnetism

Scientists have demonstrated for the very first time how a laser can be used to stimulate the formation of magnetic fields, similar to those thought to be involved in the formation of the very first galaxies.

The findings published in Nature (26 January 2012) could help solve the riddle of how the Universe originally got its magnetism.

Magnetic fields exist throughout galactic and intergalactic space and in the stars and planets.

The magnetic fields in our solar system are important, since they shield us from the harmful effects of cosmic rays allowing life to thrive.

What is puzzling is how they were originally created. A way of creating magnetic fields without a magnet has long been theorised, but never before has the process been demonstrated.

A team, led by Oxford University physicists, have used a high-power laser to explode a rod of carbon, similar to pencil lead, in helium gas.

The explosion was designed to mimic the cauldron of plasma – an ionized gas containing free electrons and positive ions – out of which the first galaxies formed.

It was designed to prove a theory, known as the ‘Biermann battery effect’ that demonstrated how magnetic fields could form where none had existed before.

The team found that within a microsecond of the explosion strong electron currents and magnetic fields formed around a shock wave.

Scientists including Bob Bingham and Alex Robinson at the Central Laser Facility at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton laboratory took these results and compared them to existing planetary data.

Using computational resources from STFC’s e-science department, they scaled them through 22 orders-of-magnitude.

They found that their measurements closely matched theories which predict that tiny magnetic fields - ‘magnetic seeds’ – precede the formation of galaxies.

These fields can be amplified by turbulent motions and can strongly affect the evolution of the galactic medium.

Professor Bingham said: “The advantage of using lasers to simulate the early processes in the formation of magnetic fields is that you can create, with a burst of laser light just a billionth of a second long, an effect that in space would take years to develop on an incomprehensible scale”.

Dr Gianluca Gregori from Oxford University, who led the work said: “Our experiment recreates what was happening in the early Universe and shows how galactic magnetic fields might have first appeared.

It opens up the exciting prospect that we will be able to explore the physics of the cosmos, stretching back billions of years, in a laser laboratory here on Earth”.

The experiments were conducted at the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation de Lasers Intenses laser facility in France.

For further details see the Oxford University press release

Rice lab mimics Jupiter's Trojan asteroids inside a single atom - YouTube

Rice University physicists have built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom.

In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Rice's team and collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could make an electron orbit the atomic nucleus in the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun.

The findings uphold a 1920 prediction by physicist Niels Bohr.

"Bohr predicted that quantum mechanical descriptions of the physical world would, for systems of sufficient size, match the classical descriptions provided by Newtonian mechanics," said lead researcher Barry Dunning, Rice's Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

"Bohr also described the conditions under which this correspondence could be observed. In particular, he said it should be seen in atoms with very high principal quantum numbers, which are exactly what we study in our laboratory."

Bohr was a pioneer of quantum physics. His 1913 atomic model, which is still widely invoked today, postulated a small nucleus surrounded by electrons moving in well-defined orbits and shells.

The word "quantum" in quantum mechanics derives from the fact that these orbits can have only certain well-defined energies.

Jumps between these orbits lead to absorption or emission of specific amounts of energy termed quanta.

As an electron gains energy, its quantum number increases, and it jumps to higher orbits that circle ever farther from the nucleus.

In the new experiments, Rice graduate students Brendan Wyker and Shuzhen Ye began by using an ultraviolet laser to create a Rydberg atom.

Rydberg atoms contain a highly excited electron with a very large quantum number. In the Rice experiments, potassium atoms with quantum numbers between 300 and 600 were studied.

The National Ignition Facility - The Big Picture

"Creating a miniature star on Earth" is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world's largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California. On September 29th, 2010, the NIF completed its first integrated ignition experiment, where it focused its 192 lasers on a small cylinder housing a tiny frozen capsule containing hydrogen fuel, briefly bombarding it with 1 megajoule of laser energy. 

The experiment was the latest in a series of tests leading to a hoped-for "ignition", where the nuclei of the atoms of the fuel inside the target capsule are made to fuse together releasing tremendous energy - potentially more energy than was put in to start the initial reaction, becoming a valuable power source.

The NIF has cost over $3.5 billion since 1997 and is a part of the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Scientists at NIF say they hope to achieve fusion by 2012. (More of the 27 photos here)

Inside the National Ignition Facility, a service system lift gives technicians access to the target chamber interior for inspection and maintenance. The chamber is a sphere 10 meters in diameter, assembled from ten-centimeter-thick aluminum panels which were preformed and then welded in place.

It is covered with .3 meters of concrete which was injected with boron to absorb neutrons from the fusion reaction. The holes in the chamber permit the 192 laser beams to enter the chamber and to provide viewing ports for diagnostic tools. (NIF/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Create your own Personal Cycle Lane wherever you go

(Image: Evan Gant, IDSA and Alex Tee, Altitude Inc)
Cycle lanes are a good way of keeping bikes away from cars and minimising accidents, but they aren't available on every road.

Evan Gant at the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and Alex Tee of Altitude Inc in Somerville, Massachusetts, have designed a portable cycle "Light Lane" that straps to the back of a bike.

A laser projects an image of a cycle lane onto the road directly behind the cyclist to remind approaching cars to leave room.