Déjà vu of last December? Not really. Everything then was in Italian and poorly translated by journalists and bloggers using Google translation. Nonetheless, it is behind a pay wall. You must pay $35 if you do not have subscriber access and are not a member of the Optical Society of America. So most people who need to read this won’t. Will the Telegraph and MSNBC pick up this story again?
Here is the abstract:
We present a survey on five years of experiments of excimer laser irradiation of linen fabrics, seeking a coloration mechanism able to reproduce the microscopic complexity of the body image embedded onto the Shroud of Turin. We achieved a superficial, Shroud-like coloration in a narrow range of irradiation parameters. We also obtained latent coloration that appears after artificial or natural aging of linen following laser irradiations that, at first, did not generate any visible effect. Most importantly, we have recognized photochemical processes that account for both coloration and latent coloration.
At least this is timely for the discussions going on in this blog. Recall that this is the “news” that got Colin Berry going a year ago.