Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-L] Sunlight Brighter Than The Sun???



I'm not competent to discuss the second law issue, but I can say that I
knew Roland Winston when I was a graduate student at Chicago and can vouch
for his work. I was a new student in the Telegdi group, and Winston was a
recent Ph.D. working as a postdoc in the group.

The context in which Winston made the first step, in the early 1960s, was
in making more efficient collection of scintillation light into
photomultiplier tubes. A scintillation counter has a slab of plastic that
emits light when a charged particle passes through it, and this light finds
its way out of an edge of the slab. Between that edge and the
photomultiplier tube is a lucite "light pipe" to funnel light to the
photomultiplier tube, keeping as much of the phase space as possible.

Winston came up with a clever geometry for the light pipe that made
significant gains in light collection efficiency. Later he continued to
work on such collectors in the context of solar energy.

Bruce