Hybrid air-core photonic bandgap fiber ring resonator and implications for resonant fiber optic gyro

Abstract

A novel hybrid polarization-maintaining (PM) air-core photonic bandgap fiber (PBF) ring resonator is demonstrated by using a conventional PM fiber coupler formed by splicing a section of air-core PBF into the resonator. The coupling loss between the PM air-core PBF and the conventional solid-core PM fiber is reduced down to ∼1.8 dB per junction. With the countermeasures proposed to reduce the backscattering induced noise, a bias stability of approximately 0.007 °/s was observed over a 1 hour timeframe, which is the best result reported to date, to the best of our knowledge, for RFOGs equipped with a hybrid air-core PBF ring resonator.