Physicists detect radio waves with light

Proof of concept at this stage.

Potentially reducing the cost of MRIs dramatically as you don't have to have the cooling system! Not to mention other fields which use very weak RF signals. Reducing/eliminating the need for cooling also saves a tremendous amount of Helium.

Radio Astronomy could become a hobby like 3D printing...

Good news. I hope this works.

John

how is is going to remove need for the cooling system for the superconducting magnet?

MRIs used to let the helium boil off, and topped it off every few months I think. Modern MRI facilities have on-site reliquifiers.

There are permanant-magnet MRI machines, but they don't have the field strength of a superconductor, so are slower and have less resolution.

Radio astronomy has been a hobby since the valve era. There were projects published in the Electronics Magazines of the 1960's.

The limitations are mostly to do with getting a big enough aerial!

and in the UK

They do a fair amount of radio meteor monitoring which has been made considerably easier by the advent of SDR devices.

Can amateurs detect pulsars?

The first hit when I googled that question

George H.

In the radio not a chance unless they had time on either a big dish or an acre or two of phased array antenna. To my surprise some have indeed done exactly that using SDR to do the grunt work:

In the optical stroboscope wheel and a ~1m class telescope would just about allow you to see the Crab pulsar blinking in and out. You might be able to do it on a 300mm scope with suitable fast CCD video chip.

Hmm. Sounds like snake oil to me, because each normal mode of the membrane will have an energy of kT/2, which is easily visible in an interferometer. My atomic force microscope from 30 years ago used an interferometer to read out cantilever tips that vibrated around 250 kHz, and the thermal noise was way, way above the shot noise of the laser beam.

Of course if you get the Q high enough, maybe you'd get enough amplitude, but at 1 MHz the bandwidth would suck rocks.

Cheers

Phil

Sucking rocks won't do you much good in Arizona ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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It depends on how you define "amateur". Here in the Netherlands, radio amateurs and amateur astronomers are operating the restored "Dwingeloo radio telescope", a 25m dish.

They operate the website

Experiments with receiving pulsars are described on the site, including successful reception using an RTL stick and SDR software.

This is an all-amateur operation, but of course the antenna was originally built for professional use. Amateurs would like not be able to afford the construction.

So, that's why you pound sand.

That's precisely what they did. Q of the membrane is in the 500k ballpark, bandwidth is 1.5Hz.

Jeroen Belleman