Design, Fabrication and Characterization of a High-Quality Factor Fused Silica Toroidal Ring Gyroscope

A fused silica toroidal ring gyroscope with highquality factor was designed, fabricated and characterized. The structure was designed to exploit thermoelastic properties of fused silica and, using a Femtosecond Laser Induced Chemical Etching (FLICE) fabrication process, devices with quality factors higher than 1 M were obtained. Despite fabrication process imperfections leading to sub-optimal symmetry, the obtained quality factors are, to the Authors best knowledge, the highest present in literature for resonant ring micro-structures.