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News and Recent Publications

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• October 23, 2008: Humble sticky tape emits powerful X-rays, New Scientist
• October 22, 2008: Sticky tape generates X-rays: Nature News ArticleNature Movie: Sticky tape X-rays
• October 25, 2008 Sticky Tape gives off x-rays National Public Radio

Educational Outreach:

On this section of the website you can find links to videos, podcast and learn about our research and the questions we seek to answer.

One of the key unsolved problems of physics relates to the motion of continuous media and can be formulated as follows:

“Why is there a general tendency of the off-equilibrium motion of continuous media to be characterized by the formation of structures and the focusing of energy?” Sonoluminescence, stick-slip friction and mechano-luminescence (triboluminescence) are all manifestations of this formulation. Our recent experiment showed that the mechanical energy put into peeling sticky tape in vacuum is focused so much that it produces x-rays!

Click here to watch a video documentary about this or here to listen to a podcast.

"Although frictional electrification is the oldest manifestation of electricity known to man, it still remains today quite obscure as to the mechanisms active. Not only are its mechanisms little known, but most of the data obtained are not reproducible and, in general, appear to be highly inconsistent and to a large extent even contradictory."WB Kunkel: J. Appl. Phys. 21 (1980), 820.

A related area which we are interested in is frictional electrification (triboelectric effect) — the process whereby if one material if rubbed against another, electrical charge may be exchanged from one to another, the sign and amount of changing dependent on the position of those materials in an empirical table known as the triboelectric series. Such phenomena have been observed for millennia and are intricately related to topics like lightning research (atmospheric and volcanic), ideas on how life could have started on earth, how it might ‘snow’ peroxide on mars and the explosions that can occur in industries which process powders.

This is true today as it was in 1950!
Links to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sonoluminescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick-slip_phenomenon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect

how life could have started on earth Science Magazine news: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1016/1

peroxide snow: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8370

The physics department is always happy to hear from interested students.