A Novel Optical Method For Doubling The Sensitivity Of Fiber-Optic Gyroscopes

In this paper, a novel optical method is proposed to effectively double the sensitivity of FOGs. Two fiber polarization combiner/splitters (PCS) are added in the traditional FOG optical path, which are able to either combine two orthogonal polarizations transmitting at two different PM fibers into the two orthogonal axes of one PM fiber respectively or split two polarizations transmitting at the two orthogonal axes of one PM fiber into two polarizations to transmit at two different PM fibers respectively. Through the specific placement and coupling of these two fiber polarization combiner/splitters, the incident light can transmit twice along the light path of FOG. The experimental setup is established and the method is verified experimentally. The results show that the proposed method will effectively improve the sensitivity and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of FOG without increasing the length of fiber coil, which is very benefit to improve the technology of FOGs, as well as the miniaturization of FOGs.