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research article

Foucault pendulum properties of spherical oscillators

Flückiger, Patrick Robert  
•
Vardi, Ilan  
•
Henein, Simon  
September 23, 2020
Review of Scientific Instruments

The Foucault pendulum provides a demonstration of the turning of the Earth. The principle at work is that linear oscillations of a two-degree-of-freedom isotropic harmonic oscillator remain unchanged in an inertial frame of reference, so appear to precess in a rotating frame of reference. In recent work, we applied two-degree-of-freedom isotropic oscillators to mechanical timekeeping. In this paper, we note that the spherical oscillators we considered have qualitatively different behavior in a non-inertial frame. We show that when in a rotating frame, linear oscillations precess at one half the rotational speed of the rotating frame. We validate this result experimentally by designing and constructing a proof of concept demonstrator placed on a motorized rotating table. The demonstrator consists of a spherical isotropic oscillator, a launcher to place the oscillator on planar orbits, a motorized rotating table, video recording for qualitative observation, and a laser measurement setup for quantitative results. The experimental data recorded by the lasers strongly validate the physical phenomenon.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1063/5.0010759
Author(s)
Flückiger, Patrick Robert  
Vardi, Ilan  
Henein, Simon  
Date Issued

2020-09-23

Published in
Review of Scientific Instruments
Volume

91

Start page

1

End page

8, 095115

Subjects

Rotational dynamics

•

Euler angles

•

Pendulum equation

•

Harmonic oscillator

•

Kinematics

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
INSTANT-LAB  
Available on Infoscience
October 1, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/172074
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