Bias error and its thermal drift due to fiber birefringence in interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes

Abstract

Abstract Polarization-maintaining fibers (PMFs) with intrinsic highly stress-induced birefringence (SIB) are widely employed in interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes (IFOGs). The performance of which is limited by the refractive index and its thermal fluctuations induced by the temperature variation. The SIB contributes to the refractive index variously along with the temperature. However, the bias error and its thermal drift arising from the SIB in PMFs are never considered. In this paper, we present theoretical analysis on high-performance IFOGs considering the effects of the SIB and its thermal fluctuation incorporated into the early model. The numerical analysis of the proposed model shows that the accuracy of IFOG using PMFs is better than single-mode fibers (SMFs) by a factor of 2, and the high performance with ultimate sensitivity of IFOGs is achievable by the special design of PMFs which depends not only on the pure Shupe effect but also on the effects from intrinsic SIB and its temperature sensitivity.