1. Overview of Fiber Optic Gyroscopes
The Fiber Optic Gyroscope (FOG) is a core inertial navigation device used to accurately determine the orientation and angular velocity of moving objects. Widely applied in aviation, marine, aerospace and defense industries, FOG adopts an all-solid optical structure with no moving mechanical parts.
Compared with traditional mechanical gyroscopes and ring laser gyroscopes, FOG features fast startup, high sensitivity, wide dynamic range, strong vibration resistance and low maintenance requirements. It avoids the lock-effect problem of RLG and eliminates frequent mechanical maintenance work, making it one of the most mainstream inertial sensors at present.
2. Wide Application of FOG
Benefiting from its compact size, high reliability and cost advantages, FOG has expanded from military high-precision navigation to a large number of civilian scenarios:
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Aviation & UAV field: Applied in civil aircraft, helicopters and various drones for stable attitude control and independent navigation. With the opening of low-altitude airspace, the market demand for low and medium-precision FOG continues to grow rapidly.
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Marine navigation: Suitable for various ships and marine equipment, relying on long service life and high stability to support long-term offshore navigation.
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Intelligent robots: Meets the lightweight, low-power and high-precision attitude control needs of civil autonomous robots.
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Industrial surveying & mapping: Widely used in vehicle navigation, mine exploration, oil well measurement, tunnel construction and civil engineering precision measurement.
3. Inherent Precision Limitation of Traditional FOG
Although conventional FOG performs excellently in most scenarios, its accuracy has an inherent physical limit in principle — the shot noise limit.
FOG calculates rotation angle by detecting the phase difference of light propagating in opposite directions inside the fiber coil. In traditional classical optical systems, photon flow is discrete rather than perfectly smooth. This quantum discreteness produces shot noise, which becomes the core factor restricting FOG’s ultimate detection accuracy.
In the past, engineers could only improve accuracy by increasing optical power. However, higher power will trigger more optical noise and signal interference, forming an unavoidable performance trade-off. This means traditional FOG has a fixed accuracy ceiling under classical optical principles.
4. Breakthrough Solution: Entangled Photon Technology
Latest physical research has found a new way to break the FOG accuracy bottleneck: quantum entangled photon technology.
Different from traditional single-beam classical light, the new scheme uses dual-mode superimposed entangled photon pairs to propagate bidirectionally inside the fiber loop. The entanglement effect significantly reduces the de Broglie wavelength of photons, effectively suppressing the inherent shot noise of optical gyroscopes.
This technological breakthrough completely breaks through the classical shot noise limit. It enables FOG to achieve higher detection sensitivity and rotation measurement accuracy that cannot be realized by any traditional optical scheme, opening up a new direction for ultra-high-precision next-generation inertial navigation sensors.
5. Summary
Traditional fiber optic gyroscopes have mature technology and wide civilian and military applications, but their ultimate accuracy is limited by classical optical shot noise. The emerging quantum entangled photon technology successfully breaks this physical bottleneck. It solves the long-standing precision ceiling problem of FOG, and lays a technical foundation for the development of future ultra-high-precision quantum fiber optic gyroscopes.
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