Numerical Study of a Quantum Graphene Gyroscope

Today, most personal navigation relies on the Global Positioning System (GPS). This system is quite accurate under open sky, but this accuracy can be significantly degraded when satellite signals are blocked by terrain or buildings, or when the receiver is indoors or underground. In daily situations these issues are mostly a minor inconvenience, but in critical situations such as disaster relief or medical emergencies, this can become a matter of life and death.<br/><br/>For this reason, there is a need for personal location and navigation systems that do not rely exclusively on GPS signals. Such a system can be constructed with a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes – by tracking changes in velocity and in orientation, this would provide accurate location information from a known starting point. This system would also ideally be lightweight, compact, robust, low power, and highly accurate, making it useable in personal handheld devices. The goal of our current research is to develop a gyroscope based on graphene that meets all these requirements.<br/><br/>In this talk, I will present numerical simulations of graphene gyroscopes that can detect rotation through purely electrical means. This is accomplished with the Sagnac effect, a quantum mechanical effect where angular rotation induces quantum interference that results in a modulation of current through a graphene ring, analogous to the Aharonov-Bohm effect.<br/><br/>As revealed by our simulations, we find that a simple ring structure is not sufficient for gyroscope design, and that alternate device configurations are required. I will discuss the potential device configurations that we have discovered, as well as our efforts to optimize the performance of gyroscopes based on such designs.