Monolithically integrated resonator microoptic gyro on silica planar lightwave circuit

Abstract

We report a novel configuration of resonator microoptic gyro (MOG), which is monolithically integrated on silica planar lightwave circuit (PLC) with countermeasures for noise factors. Optical ring-resonator gyros suffer mainly from polarization fluctuation induced noise and backscattering induced noise. We discuss eigenstate of polarization in the waveguide to clarify behavior of the former and propose a countermeasure with control of the waveguide birefringence. As for the latter, binary phase shift keying (B-PSK) with a special signal processing is proposed. Thermooptic (TO) phase modulation is the only one scheme to apply B-PSK in the silica waveguide, whose bandwidth is limited to /spl sim/1 KHz. To utilize the narrow bandwidth of the TO modulator effectively, we propose an electrical signal processing scheme and a modulation waveform to compensate the frequency response. By constructing an experimental setup, suppression of the backscattering induced noise is demonstrated, and the gyro output is observed with applying an equivalent rotation.