Investigation of residual core ellipticity induced nonreciprocity in air-core photonic bandgap fiber optical gyroscope.

Air-core photonic bandgap fiber (PBF) is an excellent choice for fiber optic gyroscope owing to its incomparable adaptability of environment. Strong and continuous polarization mode coupling is found in PBFs with an average intensity of ~-30 dB, but the coupling arrives at the limit when the maximum optical path difference between the primary waves and the polarization-mode-coupling-induced secondary waves reaches ~10mm, which is corresponding to the PBF length of ~110 m according to the birefringence in the PBF. Incident light with the low extinction ratio (ER) can suppress the birth of the polarization-mode-coupling-induced secondary waves, but the low-ER light obtained by the conventional Lyot depolarizers does not work here. Consequently, a large nonreciprocity and a bias error of ~13°/h are caused in the air-core photonic bandgap fiber optical gyroscope (PBFOG) with a PBF coil of ~268 m.