Theoretical analysis on the rotation-induced frequency difference in ring lasers with coupled cavities.
We analyzed the effective scale factor of ring laser gyros with coupled cavities in a general way. The coupled cavities can be made of both an odd and even number of mirrors, or even fiber coil. Compared with the "zero-vector-area" design in previous publications, we use the propagation loss rather than transmittance and reflectivity of mirrors to characterize the coupled cavities, which are more universal and controllable. In addition, we found the area of the coupled cavities could further enhance the effective scale factor by 1+l/L, where l and L are the round-trip length of the ring lasers and the coupled cavity, respectively. Therefore, the scheme using coupled cavities to enhance the sensitivity is more practical. These findings are important to realize highly sensitive ring laser gyros.