Lasers? Fun. Slow motion? Beautiful. Shooting things with lasers and recording what happens in slow motion? That will be what happens in this beautiful video.
The headline may sound like it over-promises but actually it… doesn’t, really. This video shows how shooting small droplets of liquid with incredibly short laser pulses can create all kinds of fascinating results — from vaporisation to plasma generation — some of which are really quite violent. In fact, it’s physics like this that is increasingly used to carve out the most cutting-edge semiconductor microchips.
The video was put together by researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. The high-speed shots were captured at 20,000 frames per second — but using a neat stroboscopic illumination set-up, the result are effectively 10 million frames per second. The video is wonderfully explained the whole way through, so sit back and soak it in. [Physics of Fluids]