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GYROSCOPES

On-chip Earth spin detection

Nature Photonics volume 14, pages 341–343 (2020)Cite this article

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A monolithic chip-scale ring laser gyroscope based on both Brillouin and Sagnac effects provides a sensitivity sufficient to measure sinusoidal rotations with an amplitude as small as 5 degrees per hour, thus enabling the first on-chip Earth rotation measurement.

As scientists who ply our trade to photonics research and innovation, we never cease to be inspired by the exceptional creativity of great physicists of the past whose works and ideas were unremittingly brilliant in the whole history of human thoughts. The pioneering works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by French physicists, such as Foucault, Sagnac and Brillouin, are excellent cases in point. In 1851, by interpreting the motion of a heavy iron ball of 28 kg swinging from a wire 67 m (220 feet) long at the Pantheon in Paris, Foucault proved that the Earth rotates about its own axis at a rate of 15 deg h–1 (ref. 1). Such a ‘Foucault pendulum’ always swings in the same vertical plane, but on the rotating Earth this vertical plane slowly changes, at a rate and direction dependent on the geographic latitude of the pendulum. However, the demonstration was not sufficiently convincing for many contemporaries, which prompted Foucault to invent the spinning wheel mechanical gyroscope the following year1. Foucault thus presented in 1852 a device capable of maintaining an amazing rotation speed of up to 200 rotations per second, allowing the rotation to persist for 10 minutes so that observable measurements could be carried out.

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Fig. 1: The photonic chip gyroscope for detecting the Earth’s spin.

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  1. CNRS, FEMTO-ST institute, University Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Besançon, France

    Thibaut Sylvestre

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  1. Thibaut Sylvestre
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Correspondence to Thibaut Sylvestre.

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Sylvestre, T. On-chip Earth spin detection. Nat. Photonics 14, 341–343 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0626-9

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