Gauss gun

Not to be confused with Coilgun or Railgun.

The Gauss gun (often called a Gauss rifle or Gauss cannon) is a device that uses permanent magnets and the physics of the Newton's cradle to accelerate a projectile. Gauss guns are distinct from and predate coil guns, although many works of science fiction (and occasionally educators[1]) have confused the two. Typical use of the Gauss rifle is to demonstrate the effects of energy and momentum transfer,[2] however, self-assembling microbots based on the principle have been proposed for tissue penetration.[3]

  1. ^ Blodgett, Matthew E.; Blodgett, E. D. (December 2006). "Crafting a Gauss Gun Demonstration". Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 38. 2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, id.58.06: 972. Bibcode:2006AAS...209.5806B.
  2. ^ Meredith & Redish 2013, pp. 40–41.
  3. ^ Becker, Aaron T.; Felfoul, Ouajdi; Dupont, Pierre E. (2015). "Toward tissue penetration by MRI-powered millirobots using a self-assembled Gauss gun". 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE. pp. 1184–1189. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139341. ISBN 978-1-4799-6923-4.