High-Intensity Lasers Throw Scientists a Curve

[Drethon]

I wonder what that says about light having to go through a lens (gravity or otherwise) to be curved?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... louds.html

[seasmith]

High-Intensity Lasers Throw Scientists a Curve
Researchers defy the laws of physics by making a laser beam bend

Ultra-intense lasers hold much promise for improving scientific tools such as laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and deepening researchers' understanding of atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics.

The U.C.F. researchers dubbed the set of waveforms making up this curved laser the "Airy" beam, after English mathematician and astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy , who in the 1820s first articulated the science behind rainbows.

Because the pulses have extremely high intensity, they ionize the air in their pathways, leaving a curved plasma stream in their wakes. Each bullet becomes an intense concentration of electromagnetic energy that travels along a curved trajectory and leaves a bent plasma channel behind. Overall, the self-bending beam does have its limits—the bullets do not deviate from a straight line by more than the beam's diameter. "If the beam is one centimeter [in diameter]," Polynkin says, "it won't curve more than one centimeter."

"We don't really understand the [structure] of laser beams, ...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=hig ... rve&page=2
(FMV 4-17-09: Split separate laser topic out of thread on Cosmic Jets and moved to Future of Science forum.)

[StefanR]

We don't really understand the [structure] of laser beams, ...

Great find, Seasmith, very interesting.

[webolife]

My late mentor in "the truth about light", Mr. Robert Archer Smith, featured on the website, Cosmos Today, predicted the Airy effect of laser behavior before 1980. His, and by adoption my, explanation is very simple: Light "beams" are the manifestation of vectors of force. These vectors are necessarily accompanied or "surrounded" by a pressure gradient, the spectra elicited by prisms, spectroscopes, and slit devices. The redundancy of spectra is a direct result of geometrically recurring ratios within the light field. Even highly collimated beams, lasers, are accompanied by this pressure gradient albeit a very tightly contained one. This spectral effect of lasers has actually been observed since their inception.

[rnb]

The standard model of light as a "wave-only" manifestation is just as defunct as the Big Bang theory. In the first place, Einstein won his Nobel Prize, not for his perfectly non-physical mathematical fantasy called "relativity theory", but for incontrovertibly proving that photons are particles.

Photon particles are accompanied by De Broglie waves, just as all other particles are. This model also resolves the wave-particle duality silliness which is arising from standard QM probabilistic considerations. This model has been partly verified by physical experiments done at Rutgers University, during 2008.

What is seen in the graphic below is most likely a classical elastic interaction between one particle and another. In other words, this graphic shows a bounce, a collision. Not a "bending". I wonder what the photon ran into?

Dr. Boyd

[solrey]

webolife, the wisdom of your mentor might be proven correct with the corroborating evidence of the "Airy" beam and the research in the following article.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/extremelaser/

Super-intense lasers can boot bunches of electrons from the inner region of atoms, according to a new study.

This extension of the photoelectric effect, in which one photon knocks one electron off the edge of an atom, could make physicists reconsider when light is a wave and when it’s a particle.

“The photoelectric effect was the most famous effect to demonstrate that light can have particle character,” said Mathias Richter of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesansalt in Berlin, and lead author of the study published Monday in Physical Review Letters. “Now we come and say, even the photoelectric effect is better described in the wave picture of light if you apply these high intensities.”

Physicists expected the energy of the electrons would depend on the intensity of the light, or how much energy it transfers to a given area in a certain amount of time. They were startled in 1902 when a German physicist showed that the electrons’ energy depended instead on the color (or the frequency) of the light. Einstein solved the puzzle three years later by suggesting that light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. Light particles — called photons — carry a packet of energy that depends on their frequency.

In the new study, the physicists shot xenon atoms with FLASH, an x-ray laser that uses intense photons in the extreme ultraviolet energy range, about forty times the energy of visible light. The xenon atoms lost a whopping 21 electrons at once, which indicates that it was hit by 50 photons simultaneously. Not only that, but the first electrons to pop off were from an inner region of the atom, like if you peeled an onion starting with the second layer.

“What we normally do when we put an atom in one of these intense laser beams is we start stripping the electrons from the outside inward,” said Louis DiMauro, a physicist at The Ohio State University working on the Linac Coherent Light Source, a high-energy x-ray laser in California. “If what they’re saying is correct, which I believe it is, things like the light source are going to strip atoms from the inside out.”

Richter thinks that rather than acting like a billiard ball, the incoming photons acted like a wave. “This is beyond describing it by individual photons,” he said. “It would be better to think about the idea that these photons interact as a collective, that they act together like a good team.”

The bundle of light energy made the inner electrons shudder so violently they broke out of their atomic prisons. Their flight left holes for outer electrons to fall into, and the energy they released in moving between layers freed still more electrons.

“This is a nice extension of Einstein’s photoelectric effect,” Richter said. “It’s the photoelectric effect under so extreme conditions that it’s better to describe it in the wave picture of light than the particle picture.”

http://www.ptb.de/en/aktuelles/archiv/p ... 90421.html

I think that it's more likely that photons, or any radiative energy, light, x-ray, infrared, etc., are something like Mr. Smith says, radiative vectors of force that induce their energy into the electron (a resonant energy "packet") . It makes sense that the imparting of energy to the electron would be a factor of frequency and electron energy (resonant frequency) of the atoms.

Einstein is not infallible. If anything, he spent too much time on "thought experiments" and too little, if any, on actual, meaningful laboratory research or application. The idea of a photon "particle" bouncing electrons around like billiard balls is absurd, imo.