But yeah, what is it? It MUST be microwave, any physicists,
scientists out there?
It's microwave, supposedly a 95 GHz beam.
We already know they have been looking for the this holy grail for
some time, 30 years odd.
As far as i know, 60 degreeC will cause significant , deep skin /flesh burns
from any sort of prolonged exposure, many infants have died from bath scalds
(re, serious burns)at this temperature.
95 GHz is pretty high frequency: it corresponds to millimeter length (3.2 mm)
waves. These will not penetrate the skin very deeply, probably less than a
half-millimeter, or so.
I haven't done a real calculation of the penetration depth, since I don't have
numbers for approximate skin resistance/capacitance immediately available, but
less than a millimeter would be my best guess.
If I have it right, then deep skin burns are probably very unlikely to result,
as long as the exposure to the beam is only for a short time, and the energy
flux in the beam is not too high.
Being scalded by bath water is a somewhat different scenario: water has a
large heat capacity, and the exposure to the bath water is for an extended
period, so that high temperatures definitely do penetrate to deep skin layers.
There could well be problems with the system though, if you ask me. If the
beam is simply left on and someone is unable to move out of it, then of course
the skin stays at high temperature and heat will begin to flow inwards. There
would be cooling of the skin, too, at the surface, but still, some heat must
eventually flow in.
So I would imagine that the beam has to be turned off automatically after a
relatively short time period, and of course, the power has to be strictly
limited and appropriate to the range.
Also I imagine that people carrying metal objects such as coins might have a
real problem due to local heating.
I'm not quite sure what the advantage would be over using more conventional
crowd control tactics like water cannons.