GIST Announces Quantum Gyroscope Theory

Quantum Sanak Jairo structure resolution calculation comparison image. Photo by GIST provided

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Cho Hyung-joo] GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, President Kim Ki-seon) announced on the 22nd that Professor Ham Byung-seung of the Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (Director of GIST Gwangyang Quantum Information Processing Center) has presented a quantum gyroscope theory applying coherence de Broglie waves (CBW), a result of wave quantum optics, to the Sagnac gyroscope.

Professor Ham Byung-seung proposed a new principle that can implement a quantum Sagnac gyroscope exceeding the resolution of existing Sagnac gyroscopes by at least four times under the same conditions.

This method secures a way to dramatically improve the resolution of gyroscopes essential not only for inertial navigation, which is indispensable for unmanned flight, guided weapons, submarines, and spacecraft, but also for geodesy, which is crucial in earth sciences.

A gyroscope is an experimental device that observes the mechanical motion of a rotating body, with fiber optic gyroscopes being representative. Recently, MEMS technology has been applied to produce ultra-small electronic components. These are widely used in electronic devices such as tablets and smartphones and play an important role in various fields like information and communication technology (ICT), the Internet of Things (IoT), and automobiles.

The best existing gyro sensors are based on the Sagnac effect and consist of ring laser interferometers with sizes of hundreds of square meters, capable of measuring Earth's rotation error limits with a resolution better than one part in one hundred million. Typically, high resolution is secured using fiber optic gyroscopes, which are core technologies essential for inertial navigation in drones, guided weapons, and submarines.

The quantum gyroscope proposed in this study has the same structure as existing gyroscopes but applies the CBW quantum sensor technique based on a superposed Mach-Zehnder interferometer to measure angular acceleration changes quantum mechanically, referring to a quantum sensor for the rotational rate change of an object.

Unlike existing quantum sensing technologies based on single photon pairs, this involves applying laser light directly to achieve a macroscopic quantum gyro sensor that exceeds the resolution of conventional gyroscopes by up to four times.

The macroscopic quantum sensing underlying this research is a new quantum sensing principle that uses the wave nature of light, independent of light intensity, unlike conventional quantum sensing based on the particle nature of light, and is also called the CBW quantum sensor.

Professor Ham Byung-seung explained, "In existing quantum sensing, securing multi-photon entangled pairs remained unresolved, making quantum sensor application difficult. In CBW quantum sensors, the adoption of a round-trip path in the interferometer made unidirectional applications based on light reflection, such as Lidar, difficult. However, since gyroscopes inherently involve bidirectional rotation, round-trip path interferometers are automatically formed, allowing easy application."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.