Compact integrated depolarizer for interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes

Fiber Optic Gyroscopes

Integrated optical driver for interferometric optical gyroscopes.

We present the first chip-scale "integrated optical driver" (IOD) that can interrogate with a sensing coil to realize an interferometric optical gyroscope. The chip comprises a light source, three photodiodes, two phase modulators and two 3-dB couplers within an area of 4.5 mm2. This allows for a significant reduction in size, weight, power consumption and cost of optical gyroscopes.

Interferometric Fiber Optic Sensors

Fiber optic interferometers to sense various physical parameters including temperature, strain, pressure, and refractive index have been widely investigated. They can be categorized into four types: Fabry-Perot, Mach-Zehnder, Michelson, and Sagnac. In this paper, each type of interferometric sensor is reviewed in terms of operating principles, fabrication methods, and application fields. Some s...

Fiber Optic Interferometric Devices

Fiber optic interferometry can be broadly explained as the techniques that utilize the fundamental principles of optical interference to measure physical sample properties or detect changes via sensing systems that are partially or completely realized using fiber optic components. While the field of optical interference dates back to second half of seventeenth century, the advent of fiber optic...

Fiber-optic gyroscopes based on polarization scrambling.

A novel fiber-optic gyroscope with a single-mode diode laser as the light source and two polarization scramblers as time-varying depolarizers is demonstrated. This arrangement reduces the nonreciprocal phase noise induced by the cross coupling between polarization modes in single-mode fibers. The experimental results show that a phase-noise reduction factor of 18 can be achieved.