Assaulting ink drops for science
Studying laser-driven explosions of ink could lead to faster computers
By Andrew Grant
This is what it looks like when a pulse of laser light obliterates a free-falling ink drop. The photograph is from an award-winning video in the American Physical Society’s 2014 Gallery of Fluid Motion competition. The image and others like it may help engineers build the next generation of computer chips.
The carnage was documented by physicist Hanneke Gelderblom of the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, and her team, who fire nanosecond-long pulses of green laser light at drops of ink. A strobe light illuminates the action, allowing two cameras in tandem to capture about 10 million frames a second. This photo was taken microseconds after the laser made contact with a drop.