Yoctonewton Detector Smashes Force Sensing Record 214
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."
Huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Your comming up with miniscule amounts of movement, and your worrying about finding the proper prefix? Who hasn't hearsd of Scientific Notation?
Scientific notation may be good in science, bad for general press.
Can you imagine someone selling a 1x10^12B HardDrive?
Uncertianty Principle (Score:1, Interesting)
Low mass gravity measurements (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
"... bytes, which is powers of two ..."
The "B" in "1x10^12B" does refer to Bytes. Had he used a small "b" it would have been bits (which are binary and can be measure in powers of 2).
The example represents 1 PB (PetaByte)
That reminds me of an introductory CompSci class that I took in community college. A student asked the teacher:
Student: "What's the difference between a byte and a bit?"
Teacher: "Seven."
I laughed out loud, noone else in the class got it.
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
How many people knew what a terabyte was 10 years ago?
How many people know what a petabyte is now?
In any case, your reply shouldn't be directed at me. I have no intention of using YoctoNewton more than three times in a sentence. What I was getting at is that scientific notation is not mainstream.
I was addressing this point:
Who hasn't hearsd of Scientific Notation?
Sensitivity verses practicality (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Low mass gravity measurements (Score:3, Interesting)
GR (or actually, the Newtonian approximation) has been tested down to distances of ~1mm; for two ~1kg masses, that would be a force of ~10^-4 N. We don't want to get "G" to a better precision (well, we do, but that's not the point of those experiments); we want to see if at small distances the force deviates from the expected (1/r) behaviour. Such a deviation would mean that there are more than 4 spacetime dimensions (with the extra dimensions being compactified, meaning they have a size of only a small fraction of a meter). If we could reliably measure gravity down to some yN, we could test it at REALLY small distances. That would be a real test for extra dimensions, and indirectly a real test for string theory*.
* = of course, string theorists will always get the size of their extra dimensions to something orders of magnitude smaller than whatever can be tested; after all, they can't have a falsifiable theory, can they?