ORTHOHEDRAL RING LASER GYRO

Abstract

A ring laser gyro uses a nonplanar equilateral (skew rhombus) ring path. In the preferred embodiment, the mirrors used to produce such path are mounted on a supporting cube having passages cut in the path of a beam of electromagnetic energy propagating therebetween. Preferably, the mirrors are positioned on the surface of the cube and produce a nonplanar equilateral ring path having path segments in two planes. In one embodiment, four mirrors are placed on the corners of the cube to define the vertices of a tetrahedron circumscribed by the cube. With such an arrangement, the sensitive axis is along one of the three mutually orthogonal principal axes of the cube. The tetrahedral ring is equiangular as well as equilateral; thus, all the incidence angles on the mirrors are the same. In another embodiment, the orthohedral ring, two mirrors are placed on a first pair of adjacent corners of the cube and two mirrors are placed between the corners of two adjacent corner pairs to provide a path substantially on two of the faces of the cube.

Source: Google Patents

35 USC §181 Secrecy Order

Inventor

• 1TERRY A. DORSCHNER

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