Rotation measurement with the use of a pulsed Er-doped fiber laser with integrated optic circuit: Proposal, simple theory, and experiment

Abstract

We propose a novel pulsed fiber laser rotation sensor with a LiNbO 3 integrated optic circuit, Sagnac fiber loop, Er-doped fiber, and semiconductor pumping lasers. A simple analysis is completed and the output equation is derived. The variance of the output pulse when rotation occurs is also analyzed. In addition, we also conducted a related experiment for rotation measurement. When the gain of the fiber amplifier is over the round-trip loss and the phase modulation frequency satisfies the total round-trip time, this optical system produces the laser emission in a pulse state. The rotation rate is measured from the shift of the peak position of the output pulse. It is shown that the resolution of rotation measurement increases if we use a smaller phase modulation depth. But the sharpness of the optical pulse must be maintained by reducing the losses (or increasing the gain of optical amplifier) in the whole optical system. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 15: 311–315, 1997.