Fibre lasers using Nd: glass fibre as the lasing medium have been shown earlier to be capable of broad emission bandwidth
together with good temperature stability and high
output power, which makes them attractive alternative
sources for fibre gyros. We descnbe here initial experiments
on an Nd : glass fibre laser source coupled to a fibre gyro.
We find that the laser has high sensitivity to modulated
optical feedback from the gyro, resulting in large rotation
rate errors, and we show that low-frequency phase modulation
within the laser cavity is a promising approach to suppression
of this effect.