ADDITION OF A SECOND ATOMIC SOURCE FOR A DUAL BEAM ATOM SENSOR

Abstract

Ring laser gyroscope (RLG)-based inertial navigation systems (INS) form the basis of navigation systems. While RLG-based systems have an improvement in accuracy and reliability over their traditional mechanical gyroscope-based forebearers, they suffer inaccuracies and drift in detecting acceleration and rotation that lead to errors. INS compute their current position by integrating equations of motion from their last position, and therefore any error can quickly compound. Atomic beam gyroscopes offer a major advantage over current ring laser-based systems in that they can have a potential increased accuracy of several orders of magnitude, which results in far more accurate navigation over time while in operation. By linking gyroscope parameters to atomic parameters (which, by definition, do not change over time), atomic gyroscopes have low drift. The test bed at Naval Postgraduate School uses one atomic beam that can detect but cannot distinguish between rotation and acceleration. This research involves the addition of a second anti-parallel beam path to the apparatus with enhanced optical characteristics and changes to the detection and state lasers to allow the apparatus to distinguish between the two forms of motion. The velocity, divergence, and optimal power settings of the second atomic beam are characterized, and the changes to the detection and state lasers to allow for simultaneous bi-directional measurement are discussed.