The spinorial ball: A macroscopic object of spin-1/2

In quantum physics lectures, half-integer spins are generally introduced as “objects that do not come back to their original state after one full turn but that do after two.” As a consequence, students often consider this behavior to be purely quantum mechanical. However, spin-1/2 is above all a geometrical property of the rotations group and can, therefore, also have practical consequences at the macroscopic scale.

In the American Journal of Physics, a recent article demonstrates a macroscopic object of spin-1/2: The spinorial ball.

To illustrate this, we introduce and describe in this work a new pedagogical tool named the spinorial ball. It allows students to concretely manipulate a macroscopic 1/2-spin, which helps them to build intuition as to how the latter behaves under rotations.

The ball used for illustration is a LED football containing an electronic 3D gyroscope, powered by an internal battery, whose faces change colors when it is rotated.

It is made of :

See more in the paper here. The information on the LED ball is on GitHub. Via X.


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