Entanglement-enhanced atomic gyroscope

The advent of increasingly precise gyroscopes has played a key role in the technological development of navigation systems. Ring-laser and fiber-optic gyroscopes, for example, are widely used in modern inertial guidance systems and rely on the interference of unentangled photons to measure mechanical rotation. The sensitivity of these devices scales with the number of particles used as 1/root N. Here we demonstrate how, by using sources of entangled particles, it is possible to do better and even achieve the ultimate limit allowed by quantum mechanics where the precision scales as 1/N. We propose a gyroscope scheme that uses ultracold atoms trapped in an optical ring potential.