A chip-scale oscillation-mode optomechanical inertial sensor near the thermodynamical limits

Optomechanical Inertial Sensors

We present a performance analysis of compact monolithic optomechanical inertial sensors that describes their key fundamental limits and overall acceleration noise floor. Performance simulations for low frequency gravity-sensitive inertial sensors show attainable acceleration noise floors of the order of 10^-11 ms^-2/rtHz. Furthermore, from our performance models, we determine the optimization criteria in our sensor designs, sensitivity, and bandwidth trade space. We conducted characterization measurements of these compact mechanical resonators, demonstrating mQ-products at levels of 250kg, whi…

用于惯性传感的光机械激光器

Optomechanical lasers for inertial sensing

本研究结合VECSEL与单片熔融石英谐振器研发出惯性敏感光机械激光器，搭建原型并通过外差干涉仪验证，证实其用于惯性传感的可行性。

Quantum hybrid optomechanical inertial sensing

We discuss the design of quantum hybrid inertial sensor that combines an optomechanical inertial sensor with the retro-reflector of a cold atom interferometer. This sensor fusion approach provides absolute and high accuracy measurements with cold atom interferometers, while utilizing the optomechanical inertial sensor at frequencies above the repetition rate of the atom interferometer. This improves the overall measurement bandwidth as well as the robustness and field deployment capabilities of these systems. We evaluate which parameters yield an optimal acceleration sensitivity, from which we…

Optomechanical accelerometers for geodesy

We present a novel optomechanical inertial sensor for low frequency applications and corresponding acceleration measurements. This sensor has a resonant frequency of 4.7Hz, a mechanical quality factor of 476k, a test mass of 2.6 gram, and a projected noise floor of approximately 5E-11 m s-2. per root-Hz at 1Hz. Such performance, together with its small size, low weight, reduced power consumption, and low susceptibility to environmental variables such as magnetic field or drag conditions makes it an attractive technology for future geodesy missions. In this paper, we present an experimental dem…

Intrinsically accurate sensing with an optomechanical accelerometer

We demonstrate a microfabricated optomechanical accelerometer that is capable of percent-level accuracy without external calibration. To achieve this capability, we use a mechanical model of the device behavior that can be characterized by the thermal noise response along with an optical frequency comb readout method that enables high sensitivity, high bandwidth, high dynamic range, and SI-traceable displacement measurements. The resulting intrinsic accuracy was evaluated over a wide frequency range by comparing to a primary vibration calibration system and local gravity. The average agreement…

Cavity optomechanical sensing in the nonlinear saturation limit

Photonic sensors based upon high-quality optical microcavities have found a wide variety of applications ranging from inertial sensing, electro- and magnetometry to chemical and biological sensing. These sensors have a dynamic range limited by the linewidth of the cavity mode transducing the input. This dynamic range not only determines the range of the signal strength that can be detected, but also affects the resilience of the sensor to large deteriorating external perturbations and shocks in a practical environment. Unfortunately, there is a general trade-off between the detection sensitivi…