This study used a smartphone's digital compass to observe the rolling motion of a hollow cylinder on an inclined plane. The smartphone (an iPhone 4s) was attached to the end of one side of a hollow cylinder to record the experimental data using the SensorLog application. In the experiment, the change of angular position was measured by the smartphone's digital compass. The obtained results were then analyzed and calculated to determine various parameters of the motion, such as the angular velocity, angular acceleration, critical angle, and coefficient of static friction. The experimental results obtained from using the digital compass were compared with those obtained from using a gyroscope sensor. Moreover, the results obtained from both sensors were consistent with the calculations for the rolling motion. We expect that this experiment will be valuable for use in physics laboratories.
Smartphones may be seen as miniature toolboxes to perform Physics experiments. In this paper, we present three different “optics workbenches" mainly based on the light meter of a smartphone. One is aimed at the precise study of Malus law and other effects associated to linearly polarized light, the second allows quantifying the light intensity distribution of diffraction or interference patterns projected on a screen, and the third demonstrates the so-called inverse square law obeyed by the light from a point-like source. These experiments allow to quantitatively demonstrate three fundamental laws of optics using quite inexpensive equipment.
We prove that groups acting geometrically on delta-quasiconvex spaces contain no essential Baumslag-Solitar quotients as subgroups. This implies that they are translation discrete, meaning that the translation numbers of their nontorsion elements are bounded away from zero.