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RE: STEM Breakthrough Contest: Harnessing the Tera-hertz Spectrum
What a great read! I'm particularly interested in the safer medical and security uses for this. It baffles me as to why this hasn't been used already, and get some comfort from knowing it is in use in places in Europe. Not that I like strangers looking under my clothes!
I wonder what a thermogram does now, and they operate on the tera-hertz level.
Were you referring to 5G with this rather than blasting out radio waves sperically to anyone who might be interested
assuming you meant spherically?
Excellent post I really enjoyed it.
Thanks, glad you found it interesting. The security use case (as it stands at the moment) is easier, as there is a greater difference in reflection between a metal object and human bits... plus, you aren't trying to look past anything more than a thin layer of clothing... so, the current crude detectors are fine for this job. The ones in Europe are pretty cool... of course, the imaging isn't quite the same as looking under your clothes!
For a more advanced use case (medical and advanced security with no need to partially disrobe and stand still...).. you would require much better detectors, and that is what my friend is working on.
A thermogram (just a quick guess based on the name) is likely to use infrared for detection, this is again a simpler problem (we have IR detectors...) as the photon energy is greater (but still less than visible light), the Tera-hertz range lies a bit further away from visible compared to IR. I'm not sure, but possibly one of the limitations of the IR technique would be getting resolution under too many layers of flesh?
This is similar in transmission style to 5G... however, 5G still uses radio waves (millimetre band I think...) to get large data rates at the cost of penetration. However, these waves are still able to be amplified by electronic receiver/amplifiers.. Tera-Hertz doesn't yet have a commercially available detector/amplifier... and would also result in orders of magnitudes greater data rate. I'm not really up to speed on exactly how 5G does the transmission, I'm not really sure if it is directional or not!
Again, take my answers with a grain of salt... I'm not a communications engineer or an expert in the field... just a interested amateur with a prior background of tertiary study... so, just enough rope to hang myself!
haha. You are a brave soul then. I dream of doing math contests, but the younger minds on steem work at lightening speed compared to mine now. Maybe a math post someday. For now, creative writing is my obsession. No one wants to hang me no matter what I say.
Thanks for all that info. Really nice work, photos, text, content.
You should do a Math post! I was scared for a long time to do a STEM style post... but people are quite forgiving here!