Zurich nanoparticle breaks world rotation record

Researchers at the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich have made a nanoparticle turn around its own axis a billion times per second. From such measurements of rotating particles, the scientists hope to obtain new insights into the behaviour of materials under extreme stress.  Lukas Novotny and his ETHZ collaborators at the Institute for Photonics manipulated a minuscule piece of glass only a hundred nanometres in size – a thousand times smaller than a hair – in such a way as to make it turn around its own axis more than a billion times a second. The results of their research were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.  “We trap the glass particle in a vacuum apparatus using so-called optical tweezers,” explained René Reimann, a post-doc in Novotny’s laboratory. Optical tweezers are created by a strongly focused laser beam, where the glass particle is levitated by light forces at the focus of the beam. This allows the scientists to ...