Foucault pendulum properties of spherical oscillators.

The Foucault pendulum provides a demonstration of the turning of the Earth. The principle at work is that linear oscillations of a two-degree-of-freedom isotropic harmonic oscillator remain unchanged in an inertial frame of reference, so appear to precess in a rotating frame of reference. In recent work, we applied two-degree-of-freedom isotropic oscillators to mechanical timekeeping. In this paper, we note that the spherical oscillators we considered have qualitatively different behavior in a non-inertial frame. We show that when in a rotating frame, linear oscillations precess at one half the rotational speed of the rotating frame. We validate this result experimentally by designing and constructing a proof of concept demonstrator placed on a motorized rotating table. The demonstrator consists of a spherical isotropic oscillator, a launcher to place the oscillator on planar orbits, a motorized rotating table, video recording for qualitative observation, and a laser measurement setup for quantitative results. The experimental data recorded by the lasers strongly validate the physical phenomenon.