Title : A resonator based on silicon nitride waveguide for integrated optical gyroscope
Abstract:
Sagnac effect based resonant integrated optical gyroscopes (RIOG) that integrated multiple discrete building blocks at micro and nano scale attracts considerable attentions in the fields of the inertial navigation, robots, medical diagnosis, and consumer electronics due to the advantages of the high precision and the low cost, size, weight, and power. The sensitivity improvement is always the pursuit of the gyroscope, which is fairly related to the performance of the core sensing element resonator. Generally, an effective approach to ameliorate the resonator is to decrease the losses in resonator mainly including propagating loss and bending loss. Notably, silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguide with ultra-low propagating loss and nanoscale size for core layer is an outstanding platform to construct high dense integrated optical components and circuits, which is expected to be applied in gyro for the improvement of performance. Here we proposed and studied an integrated resonator based on Si3N4 optical waveguide and further constructed the resonant optical gyroscope. Specifically, the structural parameters such as diameter, coupling ratio, and propagating loss were investigated and optimized to achieve high performance resonator and RIOG. The results indicated that the demonstrated resonator was provided with the quality factor of 1.27×108, and RIOG can realize excellent limited sensitivity. Moreover, the practical performance of the resonator based on Si3N4 depends on the fabrication process. Preliminary experiments including the preparation and the measurement of the Si3N4 based resonator were carried out to build the foundation for the development of the RIOG based on Si3N4 waveguide. The proposed RIOG possesses great potential for the further performance improvement of the gyroscope.
