{"id":738865,"date":"2026-08-15T13:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T13:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/738865\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T13:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T13:44:09","slug":"chinese-magnetic-sensor-breakthrough-may-help-smartwatch-detect-submarine-500-metres-deep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/738865\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese magnetic sensor breakthrough may help smartwatch detect submarine 500 metres deep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picture a fisherman hauling in his nets on a calm morning at sea, when his smartwatch<\/a> suddenly vibrates with an alert: \u201cMagnetic anomaly detected \u2013 possible submarine passing 500 metres below.\u201d<\/p>\n

Far\u2011fetched as it sounds, Chinese scientists have just taken a decisive step towards making that scenario real.<\/p>\n

A team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science and the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has created a Hall\u2011effect magnetic sensor so sensitive that it could, in theory, pick up the faint magnetic shadow of a steel\u2011hulled submarine<\/a> from half a kilometre (1,640 feet) away \u2013 all within a chip no bigger than a grain of dust.<\/p>\n

Their findings, published on July 17 in the journal Physical Review Letters, shatter a decades-old sensitivity-versus-noise trade-off that has kept everyday magnetic sensors from hearing the quietest signals.<\/p>\n

Hall\u2011effect sensors are the unsung workhorses inside many everyday gadgets. Already built into smartwatches, smartphones<\/a>, car wheel\u2011speed detectors and hospital scanners, they detect magnetic fields by generating a tiny voltage when a field is present. They are simple, cheap, fast and compact \u2013 perfect for wearables.<\/p>\n

But until now, shrinking them and making them more sensitive came with a punishing side\u2011effect: more noise, much like cranking up a radio\u2019s volume also amplifies the hiss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Picture a fisherman hauling in his nets on a calm morning at sea, when his smartwatch suddenly vibrates…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[6110,786,244402,244403,244405,244406,34015,244404,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-738865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-chinese-academy-of-sciences","tag-gadgets","tag-hall-effect-magnetic-sensor","tag-hefei-institutes-of-physical-science","tag-magnetic-anomaly-detection","tag-ningbo-institute-of-materials-technology-and-engineering","tag-physical-review-letters","tag-submarine-detection","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}