Two major architectures of fiber optic gyroscopes have been under development at Honeywell in recent years. The interferometric fiber optic gyro (IFOG) has been in production and deployment for various high performance space and marine applications. Different designs, offering very low noise, ranging from better than navigation grade to ultra-precise performance have been tested and produced. The resonator fiber optic gyro (RFOG) is also under development, primarily for its attractive potential for civil navigation usage, but also because of its scalability to other performance. New techniques to address optical backscatter and laser frequency noise have been developed and demonstrated. Development of novel, enhanced RFOG architectures using hollow core fiber, silicon optical bench technology, and highly stable multifrequency laser sources are discussed.
We have measured the dispersion for a 632.8nm probe beam in helium neon vapor in the presence of a strong pump. Our
measurements show an average index of refraction variation of 1.27 * 10-6 per GHz. This degree of dispersion could
provide up to a 33% scale factor enhancement if implemented in a Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG), and our measurements
indicate enhancements of >100% are possible. With some modifications in this approach, the same dispersion should be
achievable in a compact system which can be integrated with existing RLGs at a reasonable cost and without drastic
increases in size, weight, or power. Further theoretical modeling is required in order to determine the maximum
achievable scale factor enhancement, and the effects on rotational measurement noise and bias stability.
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