Shisen DU^*, Zuoming SUN, Zhonggang ZHANG, and Chunxi ZHANG

School of Instrument Science and Opto-electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

(Received November 17, 2010; Accepted February 15, 2011)

We report the prediction of the random walk coefficient of a solid-core single-mode polarization-maintaining photonic interferometer fiber optic gyroscope, a novel sensor that exhibits reduced thermal sensitivity owing to the stable temperature coefficient use of a photonic fiber. The random walk coefficient of the photonic interferometer fiber optic gyroscope is limited by detector thermal noise for detected powers under 1 μW and excess noise above 1 μW. Above this power level, the random walk coefficient is found to be independent of detected power and asymptotically to be 0.0029°/√h. This result is verified by the experiment.

Key words: photonic polarization maintaining fiber, IFOG, random walk coefficient, noise, excess noise

^*E-mail address: shisendu@msn.com