Lasers? Fun. Slow motion? Beautiful. Shooting things with lasers and recording what happens in slow motion? That'll be what happens in this beautiful video.
The headline may sound like it over-promsies 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 vaporization 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 frame per seocnd. The video is wonderfully explained the whole way through, so sit back and soak it in. [Physics of Fluids]