As any smartphone aficionado knows, the accelerometer is one of the key sensors within the device – it allows the phone to know when and by how much it’s been moved. Accelerometers also have many ...

An optomechanical accelerometer that uses light to measure acceleration. Credit: F Zhou/NIST An accelerometer that uses laser light instead of just mechanical strain can register changes as small as ...

Illustration showing how a single laser beam is converted into four beams after diffracting from a patterned surface. These beams are then used to trap ultracold atoms in the new accelerometer.