Demonstration of optomechanical gyroscope for high-precision angular motion detection

The optomechanical cavity, which exploits the interaction between photons and phonons in a co-cavity system, offers unique advantages for detecting force perturbations. Based on this system, a remarkable sensing enhancement has been observed in the field of mass, displacement, and acceleration. However, the realization of an optomechanical gyroscope remains unexplored. In this work, by integrating the two-dimensional silicon photonic crystal cavity with a single-mass micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) gyroscope, we experimentally demonstrate a pioneering optomechanical gyroscope, featuring a remarkable compact size and tens of nanograms of a mechanical oscillator. The angular random walk performance 6.6 deg /h 1/2 is observed and the noise equivalent angular velocity almost hits the device thermal noise bound around fundamental mechanical resonance frequency. Efficient photon-phonon interaction enables the system to achieve a 30× enhancement of the sensitivity, compared to the pre-oscillation case. These results represent a significant advancement towards high-performance miniaturized inertial navigation systems.