Impact of Synchronization in Micromechanical Gyroscopes

In this paper, we study the occurrence of synchronization between the two degenerate resonance modes of a microdisk resonator gyroscope. Recently, schemes involving the simultaneous actuation of the two vibration modes of the gyroscope have been implemented as a promising new method to increase their performance. However, this strategy might result in synchronization between the two modes, which would maintain frequency mode-matching but also may produce problems, such as degrading stability and sensitivity. Here, we demonstrate for the first time synchronization between the degenerate modes of a microgyroscope and show that synchronization arising from mutual coupling dramatically reduces frequency instability at the cost of increased amplitude instability. We present an alternative synchronization scheme that suppresses this drawback while still taking advantage of a passive frequency mode-match operation.