Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
The most specific answer within the next 24 hours wins the newest Jawbone Icon (with voice interface, in black “The Thinker” or pearl white “The Catch”).
Part of a quantum computer?
Looks like a mix of linear and nonlinear optics plus high speed modulation. I know somebody in that field but I probably won’t see her in the next 24 hours.
It’s too complicated for a death ray.
Your high school doodling while you were bored in class.
Your university notes while sneaking into a higher level lecture.
A geek’s perfect birthday card. 🙂
Michelle
Got to agree with mimosa: "Your high school doodling while you were bored in class." Absolutely.
And also, talking birthdays… avast!! What day is it? Yarr!!! It’s Steve’s day!
HAPPY BIRTHDAYYYYYY, JURVEY!!!!!! 😀
A ton-o-hugs from the southern hemisphere and the bestest of wishes.
<<<>>>
Do not be fooled by the surface semantics of these scribblings which appear to relate to fiber optics.
This is all there merely to bamfoozle the casual onlooker (that’s a technical term) and keep secure some top secret info which is carried inside this message and hidden below the covering noise.
With the general availability of ever more powerfull computers, cryptography is no longer viable as a safe way to transport top secret info – we have to resort to steganography instead. This message in fact contains some very delicate info about where the next blockbusting IPO is coming from and when it will occur.
By posting this as a puzzle, Steve is hoping to crack the code via crowd computing methodology.
Nice try – but I ain’t tellin’
I think Steve should change the award condition ("the most specific answer") to / add a new award to: The most creative guessing.
It’s evident (re: jitze / kiki) that it is quite a lot more fun! 😀
"rb87 cooling"? Some kind of apparatus for measuring (creating?) a bose-enstein condensate.
Quantum computing sounds like a good guess.
I think Jeff is on the right track. It looks like an entanglement generator/detector set-up. (Either that or Steve’s getting the world’s fastest fiber optic modem for really good broadband for his birthday. Verizon would have have to bring liquid helium to the house once a week of course.)
A low-cost "Last Mile" fiber optic modem? Alternately, a dirty white board.
P.S Happy birthday!
Clearly some sort of optical instrumentation or spectrometer.
There are some voltage threshold calculations in the lower left corner that look like bandgap voltage estimates for a semiconductor gate.
Too buried to work it through this morning, but maybe if its still a puzzle tonight I can look at it a little more.
Happy birthday, buddy!
The secret Canadian formula for having the most gold medals at any Winter Olympics ever! Also for getting the most medals for a host country.
I’m far to be an expert in optoelectronics, but among basics about fiber transmission (like calculations of transmission-reflection coefficients or Bessel functions of the first kind J_0 and J_1, appropriate for cylindrical symmetry) I see a setup for Four Beam Holographic Interferometry.
Perhaps for a 3D optical data storage device?
or a new human-machine interface?
or personal holographic 3D projector in your living room?
Happy birthday!
It looks like you are measuring something about electromagnetic radiation you are emitting in the radio/microwave (or radar) through infrared spectrum. Timing? Interference? Distance? I can’t tell. Why all the mirrors and emitter/sensor pairings, with lenses. Why the "3D"? why the loops that eventually return whatever was emitted? I can only imagine the loops are for timing, like the speed of light experiments.
I didn’t realize you were offering prizes now for correct guesses, Steve. Nice.
I think it’s a representation of laser microscopy, which enables optical micromanipulation, piconewton force determination, and sensitive fluorescence studies through the use of laser tweezers.
Hope you got my e-card for your b-day!
An interferometer. That’s my guess. Whatever it is, someone is planning to build it because they have counted the number of mirrors.
ooh, some interesting partial answers in there, but we won’t know for sure until we observe the final results. I may have to rely on a flickr consensus here for picking just one winner.
Alieness: Ah, a careful reading of "What is this, or what do you want it to be?" does suggest that the most precise desire could also be a winner. =)
The opto-circuitry in the upper part relies on polarization and uses polarization-maintaining optical fibers. They are commonly used in interferometry, but I guess that the sketch corresponds to a device for quantum (cryptography) key distribution…
I’ve done a few crazy optical bench projects myself, but this one is insane.
It looks like a laser atomic cooling apparatus with a tetrahedral trap using intersecting circularly-polarized beams (bottom right). Judging by the top right, it’s Rubidium that’s being cooled. Since there’s no helium or magnetic field around it doesn’t look like a spin-polarization experiment, so I’m guessing it’s to do with precise frequency (or, conversely, time) measurement, though that’s not clear (where is the microwave probe beam? is it purely optical at a few GHz?).
The many kilobucks worth of isolators ("optical diodes") make sure lasers don’t see light coming in the "out" door, so stay stable. The even more kilobucks worth of translation stages adjust and align the components to direct the beams, some with active feedback through piezo-electric PZT actuators. The modulation in the MHz range is probably for lock-in amplifiers to "surf" a (rubidium?) resonance peak and lock on to it to either measure its intensity or to tune the probe laser to that frequency.
I’d love to see the actual setup.
But what I want it to be is a nuclear resonance stimulator that permits efficient tabletop aneutronic fusion.
A Google search on the number in the upper left corner, 152539, turns up some interesting results. A torrent file for a Bob Marley mp3, a recipe for sweetcorn fritters, siRNA, shRNA and Lentiviral Particle Gene Silencers, an ad for a 2009 Chevrolet Silverado, Wait-free consensus in ‘in-phase’ multiprocessor systems, a fault current circuit breaker, real estate in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and more. These could all be clues.
I am going to guess that this is an atom laser beam to image things that your average electron microscope would destroy. I remember reading about how they harnessed Bose-Einstein condensates. However, I want it to be the set up for a quantum computer controlling a Project Orion-Type large scale rocket. Is there life on Mars?
First, Jim Rees needs credit for the funniest contribution! These could all be clues
Second, shame on me for posting a puzzle with prizes for something I barely understand. It someone had nailed it as a laser source design for an atom interferometry experiment to test the equivalence principle of Einstein’s theory of general relativity to 300x the current limit, well then it would be easy.
But noooo… No I have to figure out who is closest. And part of the problem is that the entire experiment does not fit on one whiteboard! This is for one of two wildly complex light tables, and then there is the 30 ft. tall atom fountain that it feeds… =)
I will try, but am open to challenges from any of you who think it wasn’t P^2 or that my lay attempt to summarize does injustice to the physics.
Yes, it is a laser atomic cooling system to trap and release atoms for precise measurements of the difference (if any) in the acceleration due to gravity of Rb85 vs Rb87, two stable isotopes of Rubidium. The trap laser has to be very precisely tuned in the infrared band to a doppler-red-shift from the resonant frequency, so that any vibration toward the source is offset by a photon, thus arresting their motion, and cooling the atoms to about 100 microkelvin. To get all the way to 150nK (150 billionth of degree above absolute zero), they then switch off the Doppler cooling lasers and do evaporative cooling, typically in a pure magnetic trap.
From the bottom of the vertical tube, the atoms shoot up and then are pulled back by gravity in a race, like the hammer and feather on the moon.
Their position is only resolved by observation on their return. At apogee, they are in a cloud spread over 10 centimeters of superposition.
They hope to detect differences in gravity to 15 or maybe 16 decimal places. If they see a difference, it could suggest a fifth fundamental force (beyond electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak forces) that operates over long distances (meters to Earths).
This Poster has photos and a good summary of the project. The wires are actually small pipes with 200psi water cooling running through the center to remove resistive heat losses.
Interestingly, this work started in Steven Chu’s group (now head of the DOE) using a smaller apparatus and Cesium atoms which got to 10^-10 resolution of g (Metrologia).
Here is the Chu setup, a fraction of the height of the current project:
When Jason Hogan saw a 30 ft. tall vertical tunnel in the Varian Physics building, he knew it would be perfect for an atomic fountain 10x as tall.
And I’ll post some photos of the light table setup… and yes with several "kilobucks of mirrors" (although they did find that cutting the expensive round mirrors into four pie slices cut mirror costs 3x given the cheap cost of grad student labor… =)
Special mention to JeffHayward, who first mentioned that it would be used to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (the cloud of Rubidium atoms).
TombaMarina first identified an interferometer in the infrared that could measure something (acceleration due to gravity in this case).
Oops gotta go celebrate my birthday… photos will have to wait to tomorrow. =)
It’s encouraging to know that so many smart people are users of Flickr. What a treat this puzzle was… reading all the answers. It was fun and educational.
Heh. Cool 🙂 And Happy Birthday!
But wow. *That* is a physics experiment, and a fascinating paper.
BTW, the team led by Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley, has measured the time-shifting effects of gravity 10,000 times more accurately than ever before! See Nature of February 18, 2010.
I thought this was a series of semi-related diagrams made while discussing the various dynamics of rocket engine electronics, but am more interested in the time-shifting effects of gravity, which get really interesting at the sub-sub-atomic level, as only Stephen Hawking would know for sure ……
Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Anti Gravity, and we’d love to have this added to the group!
Steve, I’ve used this for my website (commercial – but not selling the picture) – http://www.chennai.gre.augustacademy.in. Hope that is ok. Thanks.
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