Thursday, April 8, 2010

Deep Grooves

Chris Supranowitz, a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester who counts quantum optics, the trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement amongst his interests, decided to look at the grooves of a vinyl record using the institute's electron microscope.
Here is a shot of a number of record grooves (the dark bits are the top of the grooves, i.e. the uncut vinyl):

The grooves magnified 500x - the little bumps are dust on the record:

And here's a single groove even closer still, magnified 1000 times:

Chris also did the pits in a CD - here's what they look like, just for contrast:

He also created a blue/red 3-dimensional image of the record groove. If you have a pair of old school 3-D glasses, take a look:


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