We take it for granted now, but the fact that you can flip your
phone from portrait to landscape mode depends on accelerometers.
As everyone knows, though, the damn things often get it wrong,
leaving you staring at a screen that refuses to reorient until
you give it a good shake. One of the reasons for the screen
refusing to orient correctly is that accelerometers have to
balance sensitivity to small changes with the speed of
response—a slow accelerometer is a sensitive accelerometer. This
compromise, however, is also due to fabrication limitations. A
recent paper in Nature Photonics shows that clever fabrication
can result in an accelerometer that is both fast and sensitive.
An accelerometer works by sensing the motion of a suspended test
mass. If suspended test mass doesn't mean a lot to you, think of
a device containing a bit of hardware consisting of a spring
attached with a weight at the end of it. Every time the device
moves, the acceleration will set the mass in motion: the
direction and vigor of the a