Scientists Create 'Fastest Man-Made Spinning Object'

dryriver sends this news from the BBC: "A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object. They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute. This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill. The work by the University of St Andrews scientists is published in 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. To do this they manufactured a microscopic sphere of calcium carbonate only four millionths of a meter in diameter. The team then used the minuscule forces of laser light to hold the sphere with the radiation pressure of light — rather like levitating a beach ball with a jet of water. They exploited the property of polarization of the laser light that changed as the light passed through the levitating sphere, exerting a small twist or torque. Placing the sphere in vacuum largely removed the drag due to any gas environment, allowing the team to achieve the very high rotation rates. In addition to the rotation, the team observed a 'compression' of the excursions or 'wobble' of the particle in all three dimensions, which can be understood as a 'cooling' of the motion. Essentially the particle behaved like the world's smallest gyroscope, stabilizing its motion around the axis of rotation."

Comments

Re:Dental drill, 600k RPM?

[GodInHell]

Are you telling me a dental drill spins at 600,000 RPM? I seriously doubt that. That's ridiculous, it would burn your teeth and anything else it touched. You wouldn't even be able to hear the high pitch whine of the drill at that speed.

I guess that depends who you ask Wikipedia the speed of a modern dental drill is up to 800,000rpm - but the source cited only supports up to 400,000 rpm. these guys say somewhere around 350,000rpm and 400,000rpm - which seems to agree with the other product results turned up by a google of "dental drill rpm."

So -- if you're looking for a quick fake fact and you accept wikipedia as gospel truth - yeah, dental drills operate at over 600,000rpm - apparently the folks that sell dental drills say 300,000rpm to 400,000rpm is more realistic - still in the range of 1/1000th - off by a factor of 33% - but its PR speak.