World’s fastest man-made spinning object developed

Washington : Scientists have developed the fastest man-made rotor in the world, which they believe will help them study quantum mechanics. At more than 60 billion revolutions per minute, this machine is more than 100,000 times faster than a high-speed dental drill. The team synthesised a tiny dumbbell from silica and levitated it in high vacuum using a laser.

The laser can work in a straight line or in a circle - when it is linear, the dumbbell vibrates, and when it is circular, the dumbbell spins. A spinning dumbbell functions as a rotor, and a vibrating dumbbell functions like an instrument for measuring tiny forces and torques, known as a torsion balance.

These devices were used to discover things like the gravitational constant and density of Earth, but Li hopes that as they become more advanced, they will be able to study things like quantum mechanics and the properties of vacuum. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particlesBy observing this tiny dumbbell spin faster than anything before it, Li's team may also be able to learn things about vacuum friction and gravity.