FIBRE GYRO EXPERIMENT USING FIBRE LASER SOURCE

Abstract

Fibre lasers using Nd: glass fibre as the lasing medium have been shown earlier to be capable of broad emission bandwidth together with good temperature stability and high output power, which makes them attractive alternative sources for fibre gyros. We descnbe here initial experiments on an Nd : glass fibre laser source coupled to a fibre gyro. We find that the laser has high sensitivity to modulated optical feedback from the gyro, resulting in large rotation rate errors, and we show that low-frequency phase modulation within the laser cavity is a promising approach to suppression of this effect.