Three Hundred Billion RPM
The old record of sixty billion RPM didn't last for even two years. The same team beat itself and rotated a nanostick made from silicon dioxide using powerful laser five times as fast.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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The Spinniest Silicone In The World
In 2018 we were amazed by the magic of quantum wizards from Purdue University that span a nanoparticle in the shape of a dumbbell to the extreme speed of sixty billion RPM (Revolutions Per Second). But Tongcang Li and his colleagues are not sleeping and decided to spin their nanoparticles even faster.
With essentially the same approach they broke their own world record by spinning the particle five times as fast than previously. Their nanoparticles made from silicon dioxide were spinning at an awesome speed of over 300 billion RPM (5GHz). Just in comparison – dental drill spin at a measly five hundred thousand RPM and the fastest spinning natural objects – pulsars – are capable of reaching around forty-three thousand RPM.
Lasers Or The Sun - It's All The Same
To get the nanoparticle spinning as extremely fast you need to have a powerful laser. First of the lasers hold the particle in place while the second one spins it. When the photons from the laser hit the nanoparticle they push on it with radiation pressure. This pressure is negligible and too weak to have any effect under normal circumstances. But in a vacuum and with such a tiny particle everything changes and the photons spin the nanoparticle to ultimate speeds.
The light-sail engine works very similarly and one day it could get our probes and even ships to other star systems. As Johannes Kepler noticed in the seventeenth century – the tail of comets always aim away from the Sun. This is because of the pressure of solar radiation. The same mechanism is used by Li's team just instead of the Sun and comets they use lasers and nanoparticles.
The researchers are convinced that one day their system will detect vacuum friction and other quantum phenomena including nanoscale magnetism. But when it comes to vacuum friction it should be connected to virtual photons that should be constantly appearing and disappearing according to quantum mechanics. These “spectral” photons should affect the objects around them just as regular photons affect them.
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