Passive, free-space laser gyroscope

Abstract

Laser gyroscopes making use of the Sagnac effect have been used as highly accurate rotation sensors for many years. First used in aerospace and defense applications, these devices have more recently been used for precision seismology and in other research settings. In particular, mid-sized (~1 m-scale) laser gyros have been under development as tilt sensors to augment the adaptive active seismic isolation systems in terrestrial interferometric gravitational wave detectors. The most prevalent design is the "active" gyroscope, in which the optical ring cavity used to measure the Sagnac degeneracy breaking is itself a laser resonator. In this article, we describe another topology: a "passive" gyroscope, in which the sensing cavity is not itself a laser but is instead tracked using external laser beams. While subject to its own limitations, this design is free from the deleterious lock-in effects observed in active systems, and has the advantage that it can be constructed using commercially available components. We demonstrate that our device achieves comparable sensitivity to those of similarly sized active laser gyroscopes.

20 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run
• Direct measurement of diurnal polar motion by ring laser gyroscopes
• A high-precision mechanical absolute-rotation sensor

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Analysis of ring laser gyroscopes including laser dynamics
• Quantum-enhanced interferometry for axion searches
• A large scale passive laser gyroscope for Earth rotation sensing
• Passive optical gyroscope with double homodyne readout
• Reaching the sensitivity limit of a Sagnac gyroscope through linear regression analysis
• Active platform stabilisation with a 6D seismometer
• A six degree-of-freedom fused silica seismometer: Design and tests of a metal prototype
• 3 m$\times$3 m heterolithic passive resonant gyroscope with cavity length stabilization
• A vertical inertial sensor with interferometric readout
• Reducing controls noise in gravitational wave detectors with interferometric local damping of suspended optics
• Tunable coherence laser interferometry: demonstrating 40dB of straylight suppression and compatibility with resonant optical cavities
• Stabilizing the free spectral range of a large ring laser
• Hänsch-Couillaud locking of a large Sagnac interferometer: advancing below the flicker floor
• Scattered light reduction in Sagnac Speed Meters with Tunable Coherence
• Using tunable coherence for reaching micrometer coherence lengths and suppressing stray light in a power-recycled Michelson interferometer