Improving long-term temperature bias stability of an integrated optical gyroscope employing a Si₃N₄ resonator

The presence of polarization noise generated by the waveguide resonator limits the performance of a resonant integrated optical gyroscope (RIOG). Using silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) to fabricate a waveguide with an ultralowaspect-ratio can result in a resonator that only supports light transmission in a single-polarization state, suppressing polarization noise. We successfully fabricated a Si₃N₄ resonator with a bending radius of 17.5 mm, a finesse (F) of 150, a quality factor (Q) of 1.54 × 10⁷, and a propagation loss of 1.2 dB/m. The Si₃N₄ resonator was used to construct a double closed-loop RIOG that showed long-term bias stability (3600 s) of 13.2°/h at room temperature, 14.8°/h at 40°C, 21.2°/h at 50°C, and 23.6°/h at 60°C. We believe this to be the best performance reported to date for a Si₃N₄ resonator-based RIOG. This advancement paves the way for the wider application of RIOGs.