As the holidays approach and you’re buying wine, ever wonder what’s really in a cork?  Ask NJIT’s John Federici, who has a new use for Terahertz imaging: searching for divots and cracks in wine corks to insure quality.  Using Federici’s laboratory, which is devoted to sub-millimeter or Terahertz waves, the project, in collaboration with Amorim & Irmãos S.A. Portugal, the world’s largest  natural cork producer, and sponsored by QREN, a Portuguese national program for development and innovation, is focused on detecting defects such as cracks and voids in the cork. >>

John Federici, a physics professor at NJIT, sees the use of terahertz rays as a critical technology in the defense against suicide bombers and other terrorist activities.  Federici and his research team recently described experimental results from a digital video camera invented in their laboratory that uses a terahertz imaging system.  One day such a device could be used to scan airport passengers quickly and efficiently. “Video-Rate terahertz Interferometric and Synthetic Aperture Imaging” appeared in Applied Optics (July, 2009).  >>