Humble sticky tape – a future medical ray of hope?

Researchers at the University of Wollongong are investigating whether sticky tape might prove a cheaper alternative to lasers as emitters of terahertz radiation which are also known as T-rays.

New Scientist, Nature Photonics and Laser Focus World are carrying stories on this development. The seminal peer-reviewed paper from physicists Dr Joseph Horvat and Professor Roger Lewis was also published in Optics Letters recently.

Interest in the work has reverberated from the geek website Slashdot to the Iran Daily.

Professor Lewis said that peeling sticky tape gives off many forms of radiation, including visible light.

“You can see this for yourself in a dark room as you wait until your eyes are dark-adapted,” he said.

In his laboratory, Professor Lewis usually calls on state-of-the-art ultrashort laser pulses or special combinations of lasers to generate T-rays.

“The sticky tape is a lot simpler,” he said.

“Peeling sticky tape has already been known to produce x-rays but we wanted to see if it could produce lower-frequency terahertz radiation. We were rather pleasantly surprised to obtain a clear signal in our first attempt,” Dr Horvat said.

Strongly adhesive Scotch Magic tape and weakly adhesive electrical tape both yielded strong signals in the range 0.1 to 10 terahertz, but only about a microwatt of power.

The two researchers and their students will be making refinements to the apparatus in order to increase the output of their T-ray source.

T-rays penetrate common packaging materials like paper and plastic and so can be used to see through these. The implications are enormous for security screening, medical imaging, detection of illicit substances in the mail, and secure local wireless communications.

Last reviewed: 11 August, 2009