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wired.com

Quantum Physicists Found a New,

Safer Way to Navigate
Condé Nast

3-4 minutes

For navigation, DiMario uses the diamond to detect distinctive

ripples and bumps in Earth’s magnetic field known as magnetic
anomalies, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Association has previously mapped. Once he identifies an
anomaly, he can use it as a reference point to navigate.
Currently, ships and planes do not use magnetic anomalies for
navigation because most magnetic sensors can only measure
the field strength and not the direction the field is pointing, says
DiMario. But his team’s device can measure both. Because it
doesn’t need to communicate with a satellite to function, this
quantum sensor is less vulnerable to hacking.

So far, DiMario and his team have tested the sensor's

navigation capability in a flight, an SUV in New Jersey, and a
ship in the Chesapeake Bay. Eventually, DiMario wants to
shrink the cylinder to the size of a hockey puck, where it could
be used in any type of transportation as an independent check
on GPS.

DiMario and his team aren’t the only ones betting on quantum

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navigation. At a National Institute of Standards and Technology

lab in Colorado, physicist Azure Hansen is working on a
quantum gyroscope for sensing rotational motion. Pilots, for
example, currently use a type of gyroscope to keep their planes
level, and self-driving cars use them to navigate. But current
gyroscopes drift, much like how a fast clock gets more wrong
as time goes by. The drift is substantial enough that pilots have
to reset gyroscopes, a largely automated process, every hour
or so. The auto-reset works well—except if it breaks. Quantum
gyroscopes could be more reliable because they don’t drift at
all, says Hansen: their fundamental components are atoms and
won’t warp with time.

Hansen’s device fits on a tabletop, about the size of two

stacked minifridges. Inside is a glass chamber, smaller than a
sugar cube, that contains eight million rubidium atoms. A laser
steers the atoms, which behave more like waves colliding in a
pond than discrete particles. The collisions produce a ripple
pattern that, when imaged, looks like a bunch of stripes. If the
chamber rotates, the stripes will rotate too. The number of
stripes tells you the degree of rotation; and variations in the
pattern will even reveal the strength of Earth’s gravitational
field. Taken together, this rotational information and the
measurement of Earth’s field can also act as a navigation tool,
says Hansen. Like the diamond magnetometer, it can also be
used as backup for GPS.

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NIST's gyroscope measures rotation by prodding rubidium atoms with

lasers to produce a distinctive stripe pattern on a detector.

National Institute of Standards and Technology

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