Optical counterpart of the Foucault pendulum

Details Optical counterpart of the Foucault pendulum Optical counterpart of the Foucault pendulum

2011-04-24

arxiv.org/abs/1104.4627v2

Physics

Optics

3 pages, 1 figure, submitted to referred journal

Scientific paper

The rotation of the Earth was one of the most controversial issues of natural philosophy during centuries in transition from medieval to Renaissances and afterwards. The invention of Foucault pendulum \cite {Foucault:1852} did not stopped this controversies but further stimulated the new searches of the Earth motion with respect to the "eather wind" which led to Michelson interferometric studies of small displacements and stars dimensions \cite {Michelson:1904} and to the Saqnac discovery of the phase lag of counter propagating waves caused by rotation of the reference frame \cite {Sagnac:1913}. Nowadays the Sagnac effect is in the heart of the widespread rotation sensors, technically implemented as a passive fiber gyroscopes and the active laser gyros \cite {Scully:1997}. The recent activity of researchers is focused upon the photon's rotation, observable as optical vortices \cite {Padgett:2009, Soskin:2008}. In contrast to classical top the photon has a very remarkable difference: the projection of the angular momentum of photon on a given axis $Z$ may have only discrete values, proportional to the Plank's constant $\hbar$. The goal of the present Letter is to show the fair experimental possibility of the Earth rotation detection with a very simple optical interferometer of less than 1 meter length based upon fundamental property of the optical photon - the discreteness of angular momentum in quantum optics \cite {Barnett:2002}. In contrast to the traditional interferometers the key feature of this interferometer is the usage of the phase-conjugating mirror \cite {Basov:1980}, which alters the photon's angular momentum to the exactly opposite direction \cite {Okulov:2008}.

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