In message , Mary Fisher
writes
http://nanohelix.tripod.com/ns.jpg

I went to it eagerly.

I can't read it :-(

Through the power of PSP screen capture and OP12...

Bright future for the low-power bulb.

A STACK of ultra-thin tungsten wire could one day form the basis of a
super-efficient light bulb, converting twice as much energy to light as
fluorescent tubes and 10 times as much as ordinary light bulbs.

'The discovery, by Shawn Lin and colleagues at Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, also challenges Planck's law
of black body radiation, a century-old law of physics that predicts how
much light in each different wavelength a substance will emit at any
given temperature.

The key to the discovery lies in the delicate structure of the
iridescent material. It is made from orderly stacks of tungsten rods,
each of which is a mere 500 nanometres in diameter - within the range
of the wavelengths of visible light.

When the researchers heated the lattice by passing an electric current
through it, they found that it emitted up to 10 times as much
near-infrared light as Planck's law predicted (Applied Physics Letters,
DOI:
10.1063/1.1592614). "We don't quite know how it works yet," concedes
Jim Fleming a member of Lin's team. But they suspect that the longer
infrared wavelengths normally emitted from tungsten light filaments are
for some reason trapped in the lattice, and only escape as shorter
wavelength, near-infrared beams.

The researchers reckon that if they can make the tungsten rods even
finer, the wavelength of the emitted light will become shorter,
bringing it into the visible range. Lin estimates that with rods 100 to
200 nanometres wide, up to 60 percent of the energy flowing into the
lattice should be
converted into visible light.

These tungsten lattices could then be used to make filaments for
super-efficient light bulbs that are as bright as today's, but use a
tenth of the power to do so, and give off a twentieth of the heat. The
team has been granted two patents, with a third pending.

Amnon Yarrow, professor of applied physics at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasedena, is impressed by the work. But he insists
that the
discovery does not violate Planck's law, which he calls "one of the
towers of modern physics". "Rather it recognises that in very
sub-micron structures the law does not apply;' he says.


What's more, I can't convert it into a readable form :-((

Not sure what was wrong there.

--
dave @ stejonda