Optical gyroscope using rotating light. Free Technical Library News

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Optical gyroscope using rotating light

04.11.2018

Gyroscopes are devices by which unmanned vehicles, aircraft and portable electronic devices determine their orientation in three-dimensional space.

The first of the gyroscopes were based on massive disks rotating around their axis at high speed, but if you open any modern mobile phone, you can see that the size of the gyroscopes has been reduced to the size of a tiny chip. This was made possible through the use of a microelectromechanical sensor (MEMS), which measures the forces acting on two objects of identical mass moving in opposite directions. However, MEMS gyroscopes, due to their partially mechanical nature, have a number of limitations, including sensitivity, so scientists have developed optical versions of gyroscopes that perform the same function as MEMS gyroscopes.

Optical gyroscopes, which do not have moving mechanical parts, due to their high sensitivity, provide greater accuracy in measuring position in space using the Sagnac effect, which got its name in honor of the French physicist Georges Sagnac (Georges Sagnac). This effect is directly related to Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and to reproduce it, a beam of light is split into two beams moving in opposite directions along a closed circular light guide.

Changing the position of the sensor, or rather turning it around the axis of movement of the light rays, causes one beam to pass in front of the sensitive element with a slight lead relative to the other. Using three ring fibers, the axes of which coincide with the axes of three-dimensional space, it is possible to calculate the current spatial orientation of the entire sensor.

The most high-precision optical gyroscopes that have been created until recently were of the size comparable to the size of a golf ball, which made their use in portable electronic devices impossible. But recently, a group of engineers and scientists from the California Institute of Technology successfully solved a problem that has long been an obstacle to the miniaturization of optical gyroscopes. The result of their work was an optical gyroscope, which is 500 times smaller than similar gyroscopes of the previous generation, and the sensing elements of the new device can register 30 times less change in the phase of light than older devices.

The possibility of such a cardinal miniaturization of the optical gyroscope became possible through the use of a new technology of "mutual sensitivity enhancement".

The term "reciprocal" indicates that the technology affects both light beams to compensate for the detrimental effects of thermal noise, light scattering effects in waveguides, and other environmental interferences. This "mutual increase in sensitivity" made it possible to increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many times, which, in turn, made it possible to reduce the size of the waveguides and reduce the size of the optical gyroscope as a whole to a size comparable to the size of a grain of rice.

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Project Natik aims to solve the problems of locating data centers in coastal areas around the world. This can solve the problem of scaling the network and improving its performance while keeping equipment maintenance costs low.

The company removed the underwater data center at the beginning of the summer, after which experts began to study the equipment and the air inside. The underwater servers not only showed good performance, but also proved to be eight times more reliable than the terrestrial ones. Researchers do not yet know what caused this, but intend to find it and implement the necessary improvements on land.

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