St Andrews University spin doctors create fastest man-made rotating object
ByThe Courier Reporter
The scientists managed to get a microscopic sphere to rotate at speeds of up to 600 million rpm.
A team of researchers at St Andrews University has created the world’s fastest spinning man-made object.
Dr Yoshihiko Arita, Dr Michael Mazilu and Professor Kishan Dholakia of the school of physics and astronomy were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at up to 600 million rpm before it broke apart.
The work was published yesterday in the international journal Nature Communications.
Although there is much international research exploring what happens at the boundary between classical physics and quantum physics, most of this experimental work uses atoms or molecules.
The St Andrews team aimed to understand what happened for larger objects containing a million million atoms or more.
Dr Yoshihiko Arita said: “This is an exciting, thought-provoking experiment that pushes the boundary of our understanding of rotating bodies.
“I am intrigued with the prospect of extending this to multiple trapped particles and rotating systems.”
St Andrews University spin doctors create fastest man-made rotating object
