A scheme for Sagnac effect improvement with squeezed vacuum input and homodyne detection

Abstract

There has been much interest in improving gyroscope precision with quantum technology for realizing autonomous navigation. The laser light in coherent state cannot reach higher precision under shot-noise limit (SNL) caused by vacuum zero energy fluctuation, which restricts the further improvement of optical gyroscope precision. Quantum mechanics reckons that one unused port of the beam splitter (BS) is inputted with vacuum, which results in vacuum fluctuation, while another port is inputted with the laser light in optical gyroscope. In order to compress the vacuum fluctuation, we design an experimental scheme, in which squeezed vacuum light is used as another incident light into the unused port of Sagac interferometer in optical gyroscope. We analyze the physical process of this scheme theoretically and develop the quantum balanced homodyne detection technique to retrieve the relative phase information of Sagac interferometer output. There are two most important conditions that we should pay attention to. 1) We should ensure that the phase of local oscillator light arg(α L), the phase of coherent light arg (αc) and the angle of squeezed direction arg(μν) in the squeezed vacuum light satisfy the condition, i.e., arg (α L2)-arg (μν) = πup and arg (α L)-arg (αc) = 0 when we perform quantum balanced homodyne detection technique for the best sensitivity δφ = e-GδφSNL, where G denotes the squeezed degree; 2) only by deriving the fields from one common source can we ensure coherence among the squeezed vacuum, probe and local oscillator. Although the requirements for experimental settings are strict, we can meet the requirement with careful calibration. Numerical analysis shows that this proposed scheme provides much higher precision below SNL: both sensitivity detection limit and dynamic range grow with an exponential rate as the squeezed degree grows. The current technology for squeezed vacuum generation by using two consecutive crystals with the optic axes tilted allows us to reach a value as high as G ≈ 16 of squeezed degree. Only by inputting such squeezed vacuum light into the unused port of BS in the optical gyroscope, can we attain sensitivity detection limit and dynamic range with increment by 108. Our approach is a new scheme for improving optical gyroscope with current available technology.