As part of a program to develop sensitive laser inertial rotation sensors, we have studied the performance of a passive-resonator technique using a 0.7-m x 0.7-m optical cavity. For an averaging time tau of 10 sec, the random drift was 1.1 x10(-2) deg/h, which was consistent with the shot-noise limit for the present setup. For a longer averaging time the random drift was 5.6 x 10(-3) deg/h (tau = 90 sec), showing a slight departure from the shot-noise limit. The problems encountered in the present apparatus, as well as those that are critical in the development of much larger esonators for geophysics and relativity applications, are discussed.

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Resonator Fiber-Optic Gyroscope (RFOG) performance has hitherto been limited by non-linearity, modal impurity, and backscattering in the sensing fibers. The use of hollow-core fiber (HCF) effectively reduces non-linearity, but the complex interplay among glass and air-guided modes in conventional HCF technologies can severely exacerbate RFOG instability. By employing high-performance nested anti-resonant nodeless fiber, we demonstrate long-term stability in a hollow-fiber RFOG of 0.05 deg/hr, nearing the levels required for civil aircraft navigation. This represents a 3X improvement over any prior hollow-core RFOG and a factor of 500X over any prior result at integration times longer than 1 hour.

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