The World's Fastest-Spinning Object Could Lead to Quantum Insights

What's the world record look like for RPMs? One of the fastest-spinning objects in the world is a tiny, levitating dumbbell created by a team of American and Chinese researchers--a nanoscale rotor that can spin more than a sixty billion times in just one minute. Tongcang Li and Jonghoon Ahn have levitated a nanoparticle in vacuum and driven it to rotate at high speed, which they hope will help them study quantum mechanics and the properties of the vacuum. Image Credit: Purdue University/Vincent ...