High-speed spinning disks on flexible threads

Spinning the Threads

High-speed label-free detection by spinning-disk micro-interferometry.

Spinning-disk interferometers are a new class of analytic sensors to detect immobilized biomolecules with high speed and high sensitivity. The disks are composed of a large number of surface-normal self-referencing interferometers, analogous to an optical CD, but operating on the principle of microdiffraction quadrature that achieves sensitive linear detection of bound molecules. The surface-no...

On the existence of chaotic circumferential waves in spinning disks.

We use a third-order perturbation theory and Melnikov's method to prove the existence of chaos in spinning circular disks subject to a lateral point load. We show that the emergence of transverse homoclinic and heteroclinic points lead, respectively, to a random reversal in the traveling direction of circumferential waves and a random phase shift of magnitude pi for both forward and backward wa...

BREAKING THROUGH EDITORIAL Satellites , Spinning Disks , and Textbooks

In this issue we offer our readers an assortment of articles on various topics. Starting with our first article, Dr. Ruyong Wang challenges the relativistic physicists to an experimental show-down. In [1] he states: “. . .please don’t try to make the light-speed constancy un-definable. If you care to define that the speed of light is the same for any moving observer, we will design a GPS experi...

The System of Two Spinning Disks in the Torus

We study the system of two spinning disks in the torus. We show how to reduce this nonhamiltonian system to a 3 dimensional measure preserving reversible map. We establish that, in contrast to the case of elastic collisions, this system may have periodic orbits with all Floquet exponents on the unit circle. We would like to thank Eugene Gutkin and Dave Levermore for helpful and enlightening dis...