Thin-diameter polarization maintaining hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber for fiber optic gyroscope

Abstract PBGFs (photonic bandgap fibers) are superior to traditional optical fiber in terms of reduced optical nonlinearity, enhanced thermal stability, and insensitivity against radiation and magnetic field, which are key to improve the performance of fiber optical gyroscopes (FOG). For application in FOG, PBGF of small outer diameter is preferred to effectively increase the cavity length while maintaining the volume of device. In this paper, a special design of PBGFs is explored and a loss of about 15 dB/km at 1550 nm wavelength with birefringence of 1.2 × 10−4 can be obtained when the bare fiber outer diameter is 80 μm. This small outer diameter PBG design shows a promising potential for FOG application.