Mario Carpentieri

A magnetic vortex, or skyrmion, is like a tiny whirlpool in the sea of spins — the atoms' intrinsic magnetic moments. Like a whirlpool in a river, it twists the magnetization around itself, and this pattern is remarkably robust: hard to destroy with a random jolt.

An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. The same happens with a capacitive gyroscope: to hear the nanometer-scale displacement of its proof mass, it needs perfectly tuned gaps between the plates. The smaller the sensor, the harder it is to maintain that precision.