Moment of inertia is diagonal and torques around the axes act independently of each other. When a body is free to rotate around an axis, torque must be applied to change its angular momentum. The amount of torque needed to cause any given angular acceleration (the rate of change in angular velocity) is proportional to the moment of inertia of the body. Moment of inertia may be expressed in units of kilogram meter squared (kg·m) in SI units and pound-foot-second squared (lbf·ft·s) in imperial or US units. Moment of inertia plays the role in rotational kinetics that mass (inertia) plays in linear kinetics
Sector mass spectrometer is simple. The physics are described by a single equation called the Lorentz force law. This equation is the fundamental equation of all mass spectrometric techniques and applies in non-linear, non-homogeneous cases too and is an important equation in the field of electrodynamics in general. where E is the electric field strength, B is the magnetic field induction, "q" is the charge of the particle, v is its current velocity (expressed as a vector), and × is the cross product. So the force on an ion in a linear homogeous electric field (an electric sector) is: in the direction of