Rotation Active Sensors Based on Ultrafast Fibre Lasers

Abstract

Gyroscopes merit an undeniable role in inertial navigation systems, geodesy and seismology. By employing the optical Sagnac effect, ring laser gyroscopes provide exceptionally accurate measurements of even ultraslow angular velocity with a resolution up to 10−11 rad/s. With the recent advancement of ultrafast fibre lasers and, particularly, enabling effective bidirectional generation, their applications have been expanded to the areas of dual-comb spectroscopy and gyroscopy. Exceptional compactness, maintenance-free operation and rather low cost make ultrafast fibre lasers attractive for sensing applications. Remarkably, laser gyroscope operation in the ultrashort pulse generation regime presents a promising approach for eliminating sensing limitations caused by the synchronisation of counter-propagating channels, the most critical of which is frequency lock-in. In this work, we overview the fundamentals of gyroscopic sensing and ultrafast fibre lasers to bridge the gap between tools development and their real-world applications. This article provides a historical outline, highlights the most recent advancements and discusses perspectives for the expanding field of ultrafast fibre laser gyroscopes. We acknowledge the bottlenecks and deficiencies of the presented ultrafast laser gyroscope concepts due to intrinsic physical effects or currently available measurement methodology. Finally, the current work outlines solutions for further ultrafast laser technology development to translate to future commercial gyroscopes.

Ultrafast Gyroscopic Measurements in a Passive All‐Fiber Mach–Zehnder Interferometer via Time‐Stretch Technique

“…Such a low value of the bias instability presents a significant improvement when compared to previous results [5] and is close to meet the requirements set on laser gyros used for navigation purposes. [30,31] Furthermore, the demonstrated passive gyroscope is able to provide measurements at the data acquisition rate by orders of magnitude higher than demonstrated in other systems.…”

“…[30,31] Furthermore, the demonstrated passive gyroscope is able to provide measurements at the data acquisition rate by orders of magnitude higher than demonstrated in other systems. [5,[32][33][34][35] The much higher data rate is achieved by processing each consecutive single-shot interferometric pattern recorded via DFT. Such an approach does not require additional integration time compared to the traditional technique based on beat-note measurements.…”

“…A newly emerged field of gyroscopic measurements is based on exploiting ultrafast lasers. [5,6] The motivation for using new laser properties is driven by the substantially decreased "lockin" effect in ultrafast lasers owing to small spatial interaction length. [7] Furthermore, the intensity of the backscattered light is further reduced in such laser configurations due to the inherent properties of an intracavity intensity-discriminating Almost all inertial navigation systems rely on optical gyroscopes, operating on the Sagnac effect.…”

Cascade weak-value amplification for optic-fiber-based Sagnac interferometers

“…Precision Sagnac effect measurement has always been attractive to relative researchers from various fields of science [1][2][3][4][5], such as manufacturing gyroscope in navigation systems [6][7][8], detecting the orbital motion of Earth in the ecliptic plane [9][10][11], a new method for gravitational wave detectors [12][13][14][15][16], even for investigating the special spectral degeneracies of non-Hermitian Hamiltonian [17]. For angular velocity measurements with high response speed and high sensitivity, the phase shift induced by the Sagnac effect can be measured for estimating angular velocity.…”

Fine tuning of the repetition rate and stabilization of harmonically mode-locked fiber laser with CW component in the spectrum

“…Ultra-fast laser sources delivering pulses with the pulse repetition rate (PRR) in sub-GHz and GHz ranges are of great interest for many applications in spectroscopy, microwave photonics, ranging sensing, telecommunications, etc. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Passively mode-locked fiber lasers combining high beam quality, simplicity of adjustment, reliability, user-friendly fiber interface and relatively low cost are of great demand for these applications.…”