from the I-put-my-gyroscope-down-and-now-I-can't-find-it dept.
A pair of light waves - one zipping clockwise the other counterclockwise around a microscopic track - may hold the key to creating the world's smallest gyroscope: one a fraction of the width of a human hair. By bringing this essential technology down to an entirely new scale, a team of applied physicists hopes to enable a new generation of phenomenally compact gyroscope-based navigation systems, among other intriguing applications.
"We have found a new detection scheme that may lead to the world's smallest gyroscope," said Li Ge, a physicist at the Graduate Center and Staten Island College, City University of New York. "Though these so-called optical gyroscopes are not new, our approach is remarkable both in its super-small size and potential sensitivity."
[Abstract]: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-2-4-323
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jdccdevel on Thursday April 02 2015, @07:56PM
If you're lucky.
I had no idea optical gyroscopes were even possible. In my head I had this picture of really precisely machined disks spinning at tens of thousands of RPM... I guess that's really archaic.
I know that you can use accelerometers to fake a gyroscope here on earth, (IIRC, that's what the Wii controller uses) but that doesn't work very well in general.
Thanks for the interesting article!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2015, @08:03PM
Spacecraft have had them for donkey's years.
(Score: 2, Informative) by deadstick on Thursday April 02 2015, @08:29PM
Airplanes too...google "ring laser gyro".
(Score: 5, Informative) by kaszz on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:19PM
It's right there in the abstract. It's based on the Sagnac effect [wikipedia.org]. Which in essence relies on that the speed of light property is invariance (stays constant?). The result of this can be read out by the interference from two counter direction light beams.
Now make it really small and you got something really nice and cheap. Seems just in line with the NIST atomic clock. It's quite fantastic how many peculiar physic effects there are! Like a physics zoo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2015, @08:34AM
I just have to say that I like this post. It felt very personal, showing unabashedly the thought process that I think most people use.
Everyone else does this right?
Is the gift shop where we get our degrees? I think it is.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 04 2015, @01:51AM
It's the gift shop where you can source your reality wizard skills. The kind that doesn't rely on either software, hardware or the good will of lawmakers (crooks). It's the assembler code of the universe and can really change things. Modifying or exploiting new properties of the basic matter or force field can enable really neat things.
A degree is just a key that makes your university career or employee career happy. The universe could not care less. It's only affected by what you actually do (absolute truth if you will). If you design a working flying mat. I promise no-one will bother with your papers..
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:44PM
At least, the ones who rarely see the word "gyroscope" and first associate it with a game do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2pWzQA-pnQ [youtube.com]