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Photonics Research

Ultracold-atom gyroscope based on a spiral Bessel beam

Xin Lv, Zhaoying Wang, Qiang Lin

Published Feb 26, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Sagnac interferometer for angular-velocity metrology is a hot field in precision measurement. How to increase the area of its interference loop is one of its important concerns. In this paper, we design an ultracold-atom gyroscope by using a far-off-resonance, steerable Bessel optical dipole trap. The standing-wave Bragg beams split, reflect, and recombine the Bose–Einstein condensate packets. Concurrently, the Bessel guide drives a helical, quasi-free trajectory. The key advance of our proposal is that optical guiding enables stable multi-orbit operation in a programmable helical waveguide, providing a scalable route to enhance the effective Sagnac area within a compact footprint. As a representative operating point, we show that N =8 turns with R =0.6 mm yield an effective enclosed area A eff ≈72.4 mm 2 and a correspondingly large Sagnac sensitivity. It is a strong candidate for next-generation atom gyroscopes in rotation sensing.

DOI
10.1364/prj.584016

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The Sagnac interferometer for angular-velocity metrology is a hot field in precision measurement. How to increase the area of its interference loop is one of its important concerns. In this paper, we design an ultracold-atom gyroscope by using a far-off-resonance, steerable Bessel optical dipole trap. The standing-wave Bragg beams split, reflect, and recombine the Bose–Einstein condensate packets. Concurrently, the Bessel guide drives a helical, quasi-free trajectory. The key advance of our proposal is that optical guiding enables stable multi-orbit operation in a programmable helical waveguide, providing a scalable route to enhance the effective Sagnac area within a compact footprint. As a representative operating point, we show that N =8 turns with R =0.6 mm yield an effective enclosed area A eff ≈72.4 mm 2 and a correspondingly large Sagnac sensitivity. It is a strong candidate for next-generation atom gyroscopes in rotation sensing.
We describe a Sagnac interferometer suitable for rotation sensing, implemented using an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic magnetic trap. The atom wave packets are split and recombined by standing-wave Bragg lasers, and the trapping potential steers the packets along circular trajectories with a radius of 0.2 mm. Two conjugate interferometers are implemented simultaneously to provide common-mode rejection of noise and to isolate the rotation signal. With interference visibilities of about 50%, we achieve a rotation sensitivity comparable to Earth's rate in about 10 min of operation. Gyroscope operation was demonstrated by rotating the optical table on which the experiment was performed.
We demonstrate a two-dimensional atom interferometer in a harmonic magnetic waveguide using a Bose-Einstein condensate. Such an interferometer could measure rotation using the Sagnac effect. Compared to free space interferometers, larger interactions times and enclosed areas can in principle be achieved, since the atoms are not in free fall. In this implementation, we induce the atoms to oscillate along one direction by displacing the trap center. We then split and recombine the atoms along an orthogonal direction using an off-resonant optical standing wave. We enclose a maximum effective area of 0.1 mm20.1\text{ }{\text{mm}}^{2}0.1 mm2 limited by fluctuations in the initial velocity and by the coherence time of the interferometer. We argue that this arrangement is scalable to enclose larger areas by increasing the coherence time and then making repeated loops.
We propose a novel implementation of a trapped- atom Sagnac gyroscope based on the interference between matter- wave solitons confined around an optical microring resonator. Our integrated nanophotonic approach to trapped atom interferometry combines the long-term stability and quantum-limited sensitivity of ultracold matter-wave interferometers with the robustness, scalability and low power operation of nanophotonic architectures. The use of optical microresonators for atomic confinement ensures disorder-free symmetric waveguides for the confined atoms, a high degree of vibration insensitivity owing to the reciprocal structure of the waveguide, and enhanced bias and scale-factor stability via concurrent feedback stabilization of the microresonator. We have performed detailed quantum simulations based on demonstrated experimental parameters to confirm stable dispersion-free propagation of matter-wave solitons around the microresonator and the appearance of high contrast interference fringes due to the accrued Sagnac phase shift. We estimate the shot-noise limited rotation sensitivity of this gyroscope to be 0.8 μrad/s/Hz1/2for single-loop propagation of the solitons around a microring of radius 1 mm, with the possibility of substantial improvements via multiloop propagation of the solitons, fabrication of microring resonators of larger diameter, and the use of quantum-correlated states such as spin- squeezed quantum states. The proposed device illustrates the benefits of harnessing quantum many-body states such as matter- wave solitons for quantum-enhanced inertial sensing applications.
We theoretically investigate the performance of a compact matterwave vortex gyroscope formed by a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate in a toroidal potential. Unlike conventional atomic gyroscopes that rely on the Sagnac effect, the topological stability of the vortex state yields rotation sensitivity independent of the enclosed area, making the device robust against geometric drifts. Using fully quantum multimode simulations, we quantify two interaction-driven mechanisms that degrade performance: phase diffusion from one-axis-twisting and four-wave mixing from intercomponent scattering. We identify regimes where tuning interaction and trapping parameters produces a trade-off between these effects, and find that reducing the intercomponent scattering length can counterintuitively worsen sensitivity. Finally, we compare the vortex gyroscope to a guided Sagnac interferometer, demonstrating superior scaling, establishing it as a promising candidate for compact precision rotation sensing.
Matter-wave interferometry with atoms propagating in a guiding potential is expected to provide compact, scalable and precise inertial sensing. However, a rotation sensing device based on the Sagnac effect with atoms guided in a ring has not yet been implemented despite continuous efforts during the last two decades. Here we discuss some intrinsic effects that limit the coherence in such a device and propose a scheme that overcomes these limitations and enables a multi-pass guiding Sagnac interferometer with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) on a chip in a ring potential. We analyze crucial dephasing effects: potential roughness, phase diffusion due to atom-atom interactions and number uncertainty, and phase fluctuations. Owing to the recent progress in achieving high momentum beam splitting, creating smooth guides, and manipulating the matter-wavepacket propagation, guided interferometry can be implemented within the coherence time allowed by phase diffusion. Despite the lower particle flux in a guided Sagnac ring and the miniaturization of the interferometer, the estimated sensitivity, for reasonable and practical realizations of an atom chip-based gyroscope, is comparable to that of free-space interferometers, reaching 45 nrads^{-1}Hz^{-1/2}. A significant improvement over state-of-the-art free-space gyrocope sensitivities can be envisioned by using thermal atoms instead of a BEC, whereby the interferometer can be operated in a continuous fashion with the coherence limited by the scattering rate of the atoms with the background gas. Taking into account the sensitivity times length of the interferometer as the figure of merit which takes into account compactness, our configuration is expected to deliver a potential improvement of 2-4 orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art free-space gyroscopes for a BEC, and 4-6 orders of magnitude for thermal atoms.
We report the experimental realization of a large-area and multiaxis atomtronic interferometer in an optical waveguide for rotation sensing. A large enclosed area is achieved through multiloop operation in a guided-atom interferometer using Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate a three-loop interferometer with a total interrogation time of ∼ 0.4 s and an enclosed area of 8.7 mm 2 —the largest reported in a fully guided or one-dimensional setup. High-contrast interference fringes are observed for up to five Sagnac orbits in a smaller loop-area configuration. Our approach enables interleaved rotation measurements about multiple arbitrary axes within the same experimental setup. We present results for area-enclosing interferometers in both horizontal and vertical planes, demonstrating that the interferometer contrast remains comparable across orthogonal orientations of the enclosed area vectors.