Built Ring Laser Gyro?
So you want to build one? Good luck! 🙂 (From: Douglas P. McNutt (dmcnutt@macnauchtan.com).) The mechanical precision is the hard part and that’s what makes it virtually impossible for an amateur to construct a ring laser gyro. The two opposite traveling waves have to have extremely high spectral purity which translates to high quality, high reflectance flats at the corners. Not a home job. It might be easier to build a fiber gyro in which the light passes many times around an effective ring through a wound fiber. (From: Christopher R. Carlen (crobc@epix.net).) The mechanical part is horrendous. We have an open cavity HeNe at my school’s lab, and it is a challenge to keep lasing on a heavy damped breadboard with the mirrors mounted on a thick dovetail rail, bolted to the breadboard. Then you complicate that by going from a straight, two-mirror cavity to a three or four mirror cavity ring configuration, and then spin it real fast. Can you say “centrifugal force?” A fiber loop isn’t qui
