X-ray Scotch Tape

Under vacuum conditions, peeling off scotch tape from a roll even at a low speed causes small X-rays to emerge, showed early this week Juan Escobar, a University of California graduate student. During the experiment, a device slowly stripped the regular sticky tape off a roll at a speed of 1.2 inches (3.05 cm) per second in a vacuum room. Fast successive X-ray pulses (approximately a billionth of a second in length) started to appear in the immediate vicinity of the place where the tape was stripped from the roll.

 

In that portion, the electrons were moving about two-thousandths of an inch (0.00508 cm) from the roll to the adhesive part that was being peeled off. As they hit the adhesive underside of the tape, they were forced to slow down, and that process caused their X-ray emission. “We were very surprised,” admits Escobar. “The power you could get from just peeling tape was enormous.” Still, this was first discovered by the Russians over 50 years ago, when they observed X-ray emissions while pulling adhesive tape off glass surfaces.

 

UCLA has gone through the formalities for patenting devices that would use this discovery. As scientists believe, fine-tuning the process could help build cheaper medical X-ray instruments for cases where electricity is scarce or expensive, or improve the efficiency of the existing devices. James Hevezi, chair of the American College of Radiology Commission on Medical Physics, believes that building such X-ray devices is “a very interesting idea, and I think it should be carried further in research.”

 

Nevertheless, the scotch tape peeling process was not proven to be 100% safe, although most researchers, Escobar included, believe it must be. After all, nobody even thought peeling off scotch tape could prove hazardous. It takes vacuum for it to cause X-rays to form, and usually average people don't have much to do with such conditions. “If you're going to peel tape in a vacuum, you should be extra careful,” explains the scientist. “I will continue to use Scotch tape during my daily life, and I think it's safe to do it in your office. No guarantees.”