arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to G. E. Stedman.
We describe a new ring laser with area A = 833 m^2 and update performance statistics for several such machines. Anandan & Chaio 1982 judged ring lasers inferior to matter interferometers as possible detectors of gravitational waves. However, we note that geophysically interesting results have been obtained from large ring lasers and that there is still a lot of room for improvements.
We report the first direct measurements of the very small effect of forced diurnal polar motion, successfully observed on three of our large ring lasers, which now measure the instantaneous direction of Earth's rotation axis to a precision of 1 part in 10^8 when averaged over a time interval of several hours. Ring laser gyroscopes provide a new viable technique for directly and continuously measuring the position of the instantaneous rotation axis of the Earth and the amplitudes of the Oppolzer modes. In contrast, the space geodetic techniques (VLBI, SLR, GPS, etc.) contain no information about the position of the instantaneous axis of rotation of the Earth, but are sensitive to the complete transformation matrix between the Earth-fixed and inertial reference frame. Further improvements of gyroscopes will provide a powerful new tool for studying the Earth's interior.
A ring-laser experiment, similar to the Canterbury ring laser, to detect axion- and {\sc qed}-induced vacuum birefringence is proposed. It uses a slowly modulated magnetic field and a novel polarization geometry. Both axion coupling and vacuum birefringence would modulate the Sagnac beat frequency. A null result could place sensitive bounds on the axion mass and on two-photon coupling.