Source: Jintai News  30^th Jun 2026

If you’ve ever driven through a tunnel and watched your navigation suddenly lose its fix, you've experienced the impact of disrupted satellite signals. For aircraft, submarines and missiles, however, relying on satellites is not a viable option. Instead, they are fitted with devices called laser gyroscopes to detect orientation and position. Beyond navigation, laser gyroscopes also play a critical role in communications systems.

Yet laser gyroscopes are plagued by a longstanding technical challenge known as the lock-in effect, which disables the detection capability of high-precision laser gyroscopes at low rotational speeds. Now, Chinese researchers have devised an entirely new solution to this problem.

A joint research team led by Mao Yuanhao, a young instructor at the Army Engineering University of the PLA, together with partners from the National University of Defense Technology, Hunan Normal University and other institutions, has published a breakthrough finding. For the first time, the team introduced the physical mechanism of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking into ring laser gyroscopes. Working within existing mature manufacturing processes, they achieved self-biasing technology without any additional biasing components, fundamentally resolving the lock-in effect. This breakthrough opens a new path for developing miniaturized, all-solid-state high-precision inertial sensors.

For decades, researchers around the world have only been able to mitigate the issue with external add-ons — for instance, installing a small motor at the gyroscope's core to keep it in constant micro-vibration. This solution, however, comes with major drawbacks: bulkier hardware, higher energy consumption, and unwanted vibration noise.

“To put it in simple terms, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking takes an originally symmetric system and makes it asymmetric, which enables new functionalities,” Mao explained. The mechanism allows laser gyroscopes to capture accurate signals even when rotating at barely perceptible speeds.

Most critically, it eliminates the need for any external mechanical dithering device. “This means laser gyroscopes of the future can be made extremely compact — as small as a coin, or even integrated onto a single chip,” Mao added.

This achievement is of great significance for China's pursuit of independent, controllable and leapfrog development of high-precision inertial navigation technology. At the same time, the solution is expected to drive the chip-scale, low-cost advancement of high-performance laser gyroscopes, with far-reaching impacts across autonomous navigation, mobile communications, consumer electronics and even fundamental physics research.

In everyday use, self-driving cars will no longer lose navigation accuracy due to weak signals. Even inside a tunnel, the navigation arrow on a smartphone will stay steadily aligned. Smaller, more reliable laser gyroscopes will also enable satellites and Mars rovers to travel farther and operate longer in deep space, far from Earth.