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posted by chromas on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the knowing-which-way-is-up dept.

The World's Tiniest Optical Gyroscope is Now Smaller Than a Grain of Rice

[Microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS)] are limited in their sensitivity, so engineers have also developed superior optical gyroscopes that perform with better accuracy and with the omission of moving parts. To do this these devices rely on a phenomenon referred to as the Sagnac effect.

Named after French physicist Georges Sagnac, this optical effect rooted in Einstein's theory of general relativity works by seeing the optical gyroscope split a beam of light into two and then rotate to manipulate the arrival of the now separate beams at its detector.

[...] Although very useful, so far even the best high-performance optical gyroscopes have been bigger than a golf ball and therefore incompatible with most of today's portable electronics. Previous attempts to build smaller versions of these high-precision devices, unfortunately, have always resulted in a reduced Sagnac effect signal and therefore reduced reliability and accuracy.

Now, a team of Caltech engineers led by Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, have found a way to shrink these devices while at the same time improving their accuracy. The discovery is bound to forever change the use of optical gyroscopes, likely making them even more popular and ever-present than MEMS. Caltech's novel optical gyroscope is 500 times smaller than the best devices currently available, making it smaller than a grain of rice, yet it can detect phase shifts 30 times smaller than even the most precise models out there. To do this, the tiny device uses something called "reciprocal sensitivity enhancement."

Also at Caltech.

Nanophotonic optical gyroscope with reciprocal sensitivity enhancement (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0266-5) (DX) (correction)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday October 30 2018, @06:24PM (7 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday October 30 2018, @06:24PM (#755734) Journal

    Not to go off on a tangent, but what's their angle here?

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  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday October 30 2018, @07:07PM (3 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Tuesday October 30 2018, @07:07PM (#755746) Journal

    I guess it's our turn to analyze the spin in this news.

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    Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday October 31 2018, @12:45AM (2 children)

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday October 31 2018, @12:45AM (#755877) Journal

      Turnabout is fair play, I hear. Depending on your orientation, of course.

      • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday October 31 2018, @05:32AM (1 child)

        by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday October 31 2018, @05:32AM (#755939)

        Let's keep a level head about it.

        --
        The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
        • (Score: 2) by VanessaE on Wednesday October 31 2018, @07:26PM

          by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 31 2018, @07:26PM (#756125) Journal

          Well you know the usual story arc with new tech - the media will just dance around the issue of mass production, giving us all a ray of hope, until eventually the invention takes a straight line into someone's patent bin.

          (ok, I'll just see myself out, now)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:57PM (#755822)

    Let us note that a ring laser gyroscope has no moving parts.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @04:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @04:16PM (#756046)

      Well, the light is moving. :-)

  • (Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday October 31 2018, @12:33PM

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Wednesday October 31 2018, @12:33PM (#755990)

    Sine on the dotted line and they might tell you. You may need a cosine-er, though.