John McLeod, a University of Saskatchewan PhD candidate, has been investigating mesoporous silicon as a potential touch-free bomb detector at the Canadian Light Source.
The synchrotron allows researchers to isolate beams of intense light, providing researchers an effective way of understanding a material’s structure. After McLeod placed silicon that had been exposed to explosives into a beamline, he and his team discovered that despite the two materials not making physical contact, silicon reacted to airborne particles from the explosive. Read the whole article here: