Optical compensation for compressing polarization nonreciprocity induced errors in interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes

Abstract

Optical compensation is studied for suppressing polarization nonreciprocity (PN) induced errors in interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes (IFOG). In convention IFOGs, a polarizer is necessarily used, and only one polarization is used for interference in order to achieve low PN error. Differently, we propose a new approach for using two polarizations simultaneously in the IFOG. PN error can be effectively suppressing by optical compensation between the two detected signals. Both simulation and experiment are presented, which shows that PN errors are effectively reduced by optical compensation. This new approach paves the way for low drift IFOGs with no polarizer. © (2013) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.