An Ultra-Sensitive and Compact Superluminal Ring Laser Gyroscope

Recently, we have shown that the fast light effect and its manifestation in the white light cavity effect can be used to realize a superluminal ring laser gyroscope (SRLG) that can be ~10^6 times more sensitive when compared to a conventional ring laser gyroscope (RLG) of the same size. Alternatively, for a given accuracy need, the SRLG can be much smaller in size than a conventional RLG, since the sensitivity of such a gyroscope scales with the enclosed area. A simple modification of the SRLG can turn it into a superluminal ring laser accelerometer (SRLA), with the same degree (10^6) of enhancement in sensitivity compared to a conventional interferometric accelerometer, with no direct dependence on area. With enough resources devoted to miniaturization, it should be possible to use this technology to realize a three-axes superluminal inertial measurement unit (SIMU) that will occupy a volume of about 1.65 cubic inches (3 cm X 3 cm X 3 cm), with a gyro sensitivity of ~1.6X10^-7 deg/hr/√Hz, and an acceleration sensitivity of ~3 pico-g/√Hz. The goal of this seed project would be to carry out a key experiment that would establish the feasibility of realizing this technology, focusing only on the SRLG.