PHYSICISTS have set a new record for detecting tiny forces by recording a
“nudge” of only 2 attonewtons—2 billionths of a billionth of a newton. “An
attonewton is to the weight of a feather as the weight of a feather is to the
weight of the Hoover dam,” says John Mamin of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in
California.
The advance takes researchers a step closer to the goal of detecting
individual protons and electrons using magnetic resonance imaging.
MRI can detect different substances inside the human body, for example, by
applying varying magnetic fields and detecting oscillations in the…
