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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".