Low-Drift Closed-Loop Fiber Optic Gyroscope of High Scale Factor Stability Driven by Laser With External Phase Modulation

In view of the poor scale factor stability of the interferometric fiber optic gyroscope(IFOG),it is a creative method to use laser to drive the IFOG for its better frequency stabilization characteristics instead of the broadband light source.As the linewidth of laser is narrow,the errors of coherent backscattering,polarization coupling,and Kerr effect are reintroduced which cause more noise and drift.This paper studies laser spectrum broadening based on external phase modulation of Gaussian white noise(GWN).The theoretical analysis and test results indicate that this method has a good effect on spectrum broadening and can be used to improve the performance of the laser-driven IFOG.In the established closed-loop IFOG,a four-state modulation(FSM)is adopted to avoid temperature instability of the multifunction integrated-optic chip(MIOC)and drift caused by the electronic circuit in demodulation.The experimental results show that the IFOG driven by broadened laser has the angular random walk noise of 0.0038°/√h and the drift of 0.017°/h,which are 62%and 66%better than those without modulation respectively,of which the drift has reached the level of the broadband light source.Although the noise still needs further reduction,its scale factor stability is 0.38 ppm,which has an overwhelming advantage compared with the traditional IFOG.

High-capacity free-space optical link in the midinfrared thermal atmospheric windows using unipolar quantum devices

Free-space optical communication is a very promising alternative to fiber communication systems,in terms of ease of deployment and costs.Midinfrared light has several features of utter relevance for free-space applications:low absorption when propagating in the atmosphere even under adverse conditions,robustness of the wavefront during long-distance propagation,and absence of regulations and restrictions for this range of wavelengths.A proof-of-concept of high-speed transmission taking advantage of intersubband devices has recently been demonstrated,but this effort was limited by the short-distance optical path(up to 1 m).In this work,we study the possibility of building a long-range link using unipolar quantum optoelectronics.Two different detectors are used:an uncooled quantum cascade detector and a nitrogen-cooled quantum well-infrared photodetector.We evaluate the maximum data rate of our link in a back-to-back configuration before adding a Herriott cell to increase the length of the light path up to 31 m.By using pulse shaping,pre-and post-processing,we reach a record bitrate of 30 Gbit s−1 for both two-level(OOK)and four-level(PAM-4)modulation schemes for a 31-m propagation link and a bit error rate compatible with error-correction codes.