Slashdot Mirror
Yoctonewton Detector Smashes Force Sensing Record
KentuckyFC writes "A team of physicists has measured the smallest force ever recorded, at 174 yoctonewtons (yocto=10^-24), beating the previous best by three orders of magnitude. Their measurement device consists of a few dozen beryllium ions trapped in magnetic and electric fields using a device called a Penning trap. These ions vibrate at between a few mega and kilohertz, frequencies that can be accurately measured by bouncing laser light off the ions and measuring any Doppler shift they cause. Being charged, the ions are highly susceptible to the tiny forces associated with stray magnetic and electric fields, which change the frequency at which the ions vibrate. Hence the super-sensitive measurements. They team says that straightforward modifications should allow them to measure single yoctonewtons in the near future. This sudden leap in sensitivity could cause a problem for the system of SI prefixes, which don't yet come any smaller than yocto."
Who hasn't hearsd of Scientific Notation?
I haven't hearsd of it.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Who hasn't hearsd of Scientific Notation?
I haven't hearsd of it.
Don't worry, you have a large selection of hearsding aids to choose from.
As long as you have good sighst...
They may or may not have. It's impossible to tell.
Simple. Call them deciyoctos, centiyoctos, miliyoctos, microyoctos, etc. The problem will be solved forever. It's not like we will find anything smaller.
On Slashdot you never can be sure if you are reading a joke from a genius or a line from an idiot.
There is an accepted mathematical (and computer) notation for it. Please use that - there is no need to resort to the equivalent of emoticons.
As an aside, why does every possible potential fraction of a unit need it's own prefix? Unless it is widely used to warrant a prefix, using a numeric power is just fine. Somehow I doubt these units will be common enough for anyone to even remember. SI is really going overboard on this, taking an idea to absurdity.
Haven't had time to read the article but it would amazing if force measurements at these levels could be conducted between well characterized masses to validate general relativity at low mass short distance scales.
Even without reverting to scientific notation or a new SI-prefix they can go down to 0.001 yN before anyone starts to complain. That's 3 orders of magnitude beyond what they claim to be able to measure "soon" and 5 beyond what they did.
And besides that, popular press doesn't seem to have problems with reverting to "100 million billions of bytes or kilometers", so why not "millionths of yN". It's not as if anyone still has a feel for these numbers beyond "peta" or "femto"... except for the scientists that run into them.
...to detect the attractive force a Linux nerd radiates out to women.
Who hasn't hearsd of Scientific Notation?
I haven't hearsd of it.
Don't worry, you have a large selection of hearsding aids to choose from.
As long as you have good sighst...
And if you don't have good sighst, I hearsd that there's a way to fix that as long as you can tatse well.
Logically, 10^-27 would be called xennea
The recurrence is:
zepta (Z + hepta=7)
yocto (Y + okto=8)
xennea(X + ennea=9)
What will we do after Apple makes the iPod Yocto?
Isn't it obvious? We'll bitch about how useless and locked-down it is whilst simultaneously posting at least two stories a day that say how it is changing the world.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Wait 'til the teachers get told to start teaching this gibi crap at school. Suddenly all the recent graduates are talking exbi this and zebi that and you're still talking exa and zetta, and all of a sudden you're looking like a dibinosaur.
If medicine were ever perfected, we'd all be the same.
+1x10^0 insightful :)
No. For hard drive marketing people, one megabyte is 1,000,000 byte, just as for ISP marketing people, unlimited is until we tire of you.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
As long as they can measure it in Libraries of Congresses, I'm okay with it.
I have to wonder what exactly they expect to measure with such a device. The premise of the Penning trap device is to use a static magnetic field (magnets) and an electric field (electric circuits) to cap the ends of the device to contain the super cooled, in this case beryllium ions. In order to "measure" external electric fields one has to let in external electromagnetic radiation, which will not come without having some overall effects on the containment vessel and circuitry as well. With external electromagnetic radiation power propagating at r^2 the vessel will get more of a dose than the beryllium ions and the electric field will have some level of modulation which will in turn make the ions vibrate in the axial direction based on the reactance of the containment circuitry, not the primary waveform desired to be measured. Yes, you will measure vibrations at the quantum level, but are you really measuring what you think you are? The device is likely so sensitive that due to the uncertainty principal it may defy us the ability to prove what is actually being measured.
Fig. The prefix should definitely be fig.