Enhanced sensitivity of optical gyroscope in a mechanical parity-time-symmetric system based on exceptional point

Abstract

High-sensitivity gyroscope is widely used for rotation detection in several practical applications. Recently, exceptional points (EPs) have garnered considerable attention for enhancing the sensitivity of sensors based on optical cavities. Here, we propose an EP-enhanced optical gyroscope based on mechanical parity-time (PT) symmetry in a microcavity system. We demonstrate that by pumping the two optical modes with different colors, i.e., blue and red detuning, an effective mechanical PT-symmetric system can be obtained, and the system can be prepared at EP with appropriate parameters. The sensitivity of gyroscope at EP was enhanced by more than one order of magnitude in the weak perturbation regime as compared to that at diabolic point. This indicates that the sensitivity of gyroscope can be effectively enhanced by monitoring the mechanical modes rather than the optical modes. Overall, our work provides a promising approach to design high-sensitivity gyroscopes in optical microcavities and is potentially useful in a variety of research fields including fundamental physics and precision measurement.

Experimental demonstration of phase-matching and Sagnac effect in a millimeter-scale wedged resonator gyroscope

“…Chip-based devices are a mainstream of development in recent years, such as photon source [1], optical sensing [2], and quantum key distribution [3,4]. Gyroscopes for rotation sensing with high sensitivity and precision have been studied in various systems ranging from microoptical-electro-mechanical system [5,6], cold atom system [7,8], optomechanical system [9,10], photon and matter-wave interferometers [11,12], to solid spin system [13][14][15]. Based on the Sagnac effect [16], the phase difference between two counter-propagation beams in a resonator resulting from rotation, optical gyroscopes [17][18][19][20][21][22] have been widely used in numerous applications such as remote control [23] and optical test for gravitation theories [24] in recent decades.…”

Practical lineshape of a laser operating near an exceptional point

“…In addition, the relation between the fundamental sensitivity limit at an EP and the Petermann effect has been studied 20 . Recently, the idea of improving the sensitivity of the gyroscope with a mechanical EP has been proposed 21 and sensitivity enhancement with exceptional surfaces has been demonstrated 22 .…”

Tunable partial polarization beam splitter and optomechanically induced Faraday effect

“…High-quality whispering gallery mode (WGM) microcavities [39] have potential value in investigating fundamental physics and practical technologies such as cavity optomechanics [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51], low-threshold lasing [52][53][54][55][56][57], quantum sensing [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66], and nonlinear optics [42,[67][68][69][70] due to their ability to enhance light-matter interactions. Characterized by exploring the radiation pressure interaction between optical modes and mechanical modes, optomechanics exhibits rich physical phenomena such as optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT) [41,42,48,71], absorption (OMIA) [48,72,73], and optomechanically induced Faraday effect (OMIFE) [74].…”