By combining the requirements on the angular random walk and the bias stability of an optical passive resonant gyroscope, we end up with simple expressions of its minimum diameter and the maximum power it should be probed with. These design parameters depend only on the propagation losses, the mode size and the Kerr properties of the cavity material. We applied these results to passive miniature resonant optical gyroscope based on state-of-the-art performances of photonic integrated circuit and whispering gallery mode technologies. We show that tactical grade gyroscope performances can be achieved with a diameter of a few cm provided the detrimental influence of the Kerr effect is mitigated using, for instance, an active control of the unbalance in the intensities. We further extend the analysis to medium performance gyroscope and give some hints on the efforts to be made to potentially demonstrate a miniature resonant optical gyroscope with this level of performance.
In a resonator fiber optic gyroscope (RFOG), a residual amplitude modulation (RAM) may appear with the light phase modulation used to generate the error signals, which are necessary for locking the frequency of the laser on the optical cavity resonance and measure the angular velocity. The RAM causes an unstable bias on the resonance frequency measurement and thus limits the gyro performances. A well-known method to suppress the RAM was introduced by Wong and Hall in 1985. The intensity of the modulated beam is monitored, before entering the resonator, to generate a continuous voltage controlling the natural birefringence of the modulator crystal. We show that this technique seems to be not adapted to setup with an imperfect polarizer (having a limited extinction ratio) at the output of phase modulator followed by component exhibiting polarization dependent losses. To counter this limit, we propose a new strategy and we illustrate its effectiveness with two types of phase modulator to probe a cavity resonance in transmission and reflection.
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