Integrated Silicon Nitride Optical Gyroscope: Design, Fabrication, and Path to Quantum Enhancement

Optical gyroscopes, such as fiber-optic and ring-laser devices, exploit the Sagnac effect to measure rotation and are crucial for modern navigation systems. The growing demand for compact, low-cost, and high-precision inertial sensors, driven by autonomous systems and portable navigation, has sparked strong interest in miniaturized devices. Recent advances in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have enabled the fabrication of optical gyroscopes at chip scale, leveraging mature platforms such as silicon-on-insulator and silicon nitride. Despite this progress, current integrated gyroscopes fall short of navigation-grade performance, primarily due to their limited effective area. Quantum metrology provides a pathway to improve the precision of the phase measurement to levels which would not be attainable using only classical light sources. By employing quantum states of light, such as entangled N00N states, these devices can surpass classical noise limits, paving the way for integrated gyroscopes that achieve high performance in a chip-scale format. In this work, we present the design, simulation, and initial fabrication results of an integrated interferometric optical gyroscope based on a silicon nitride waveguide coil and assess the feasibility of leveraging non-classical states of light within current technological constraints.