Levitating Graphene Is Fastest-Spinning Object

techbeat writes "A flake of exotic carbon a few atoms thick has claimed a record: the speck has been spun faster than any other object, at a clip of 60 million rotations per minute. Previously, micrometre-sized crystals have been spun at up to 30,000 rpm using an optical trap. It is thanks to graphene's amazing strength that the flakes are not pulled apart by the much higher spinning rate, says Bruce Kane at the University of Maryland in College Park. Spinning could be a way to probe the properties of graphene, or manipulate it in new ways."

Comments

Re:30k rpm = typo

[Anonymous Coward]

No typo. Read the original abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19424395

500 turns per second. But your HD isn't put to rotation by a light beam - that's the news of this article, not the speed.