this was actually made last year, and the official version was originally released in the fruit shell (see reading the original text), but it hasn't been posted here yet.

the idea of making a fluorescent Christmas tree originally came from a photo posted by Brian Wagner, a chemistry professor on Twitter:

this person is doing fluorescent molecular research. Anything in the laboratory can glow blingbling under ultraviolet light. Usually, he also likes to take all kinds of fluorescent photos. At Christmas, he simply tied the fluorescent dye solution to the Christmas tree, making it the most dazzling Christmas tree in the laboratory.

I thought I liked this idea very much at that time, but we certainly don't have such a professional stock of fluorescent dyes. But it doesn't matter, fluorescence is actually a very common phenomenon, many things in daily life also have fluorescence! So I chose the following things: turmeric, vegetable leaves, yellow fluorescent pen and tonic water, and tried it with my friends in the fruit shell lab.

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both turmeric and vegetable leaves are dissolved and extracted with ethanol. Curcumin provides yellow fluorescence in the solution, while usually green chlorophyll glows red when excited by ultraviolet light. The dye of the yellow fluorescent pen dissolves in water and can get bright green fluorescence, while tonic water is the easiest, as long as you pour it into a glass container and hit it with ultraviolet light, you can see the blue fluorescence, which comes from quinine.

it doesn't seem complicated at all, as long as you prepare the solution, put it in a container such as a test tube or a conical bottle, then fix it to the iron platform, and then turn off the light and turn on the UV light to enjoy it. But in fact, it's not that simple...

first of all, we are keenly aware that what really determines the effect of the picture is how strong the UV light is. Although I have said time and again before that, considering the safety of the eyes, the small UV lamp for banknote inspection is the safest choice-but! If your goal is to take a good picture, this kind of lamp is really not good. On the one hand, the luminance of the excited fluorescence is so weak that the lamp is too small to illuminate at once; on the other hand, the stray light is also obvious, making everything purple. Finally, I borrowed a more powerful UV light from the old cat to get a more visible effect, but considering that everyone's eyes can't be open all the time, this thing really just lit up when taking pictures.

secondly, without looking at fluorescence, our results do sell better. It's a long story, although some Christmas decorations have been added, but it turns out it's better not to add them at all (I don't seem to be aesthetic either). We even added a pile of artificial snow made of sodium polyacrylate, but the effect is still …... It's hard to say _ (: curcumin "∠)

but at least there are better lights off:

(from top to bottom: curcumin ethanol solution (yellow), chlorophyll ethanol solution (red), fluorescent pen solution (green), an unilluminated curcumin ethanol solution (yellow), chlorophyll solution in a pudding bottle (red) Tang Lishui (blue)

and the very complicated lighting version:

(in the end, we removed all these endless decorations. The bottom bottle is tonic with a little blue pigment)

the final feeling: this is not easy to install _ (: chocolate "∠) _ but it feels good to be able to fiddle with something you like at Christmas. And then got the comments from the original author Professor Brian Wagner!

although I don't really recommend you to do it, I still like this experiment. However, if you purely want to get the effect of glowing in the dark, it may be better to break a few glow sticks and hang them on a tree