Polarization mode dispersion

About: Polarization mode dispersion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5147 publications have been published within this topic receiving 80055 citations. The topic is also known as: PMD.

Measurement and analysis of pump-dependent refractive index and dispersion effects in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

Abstract: In a doped fiber, at wavelengths close to an absorption, the refractive index, and hence the dispersion, is expected to be a strong function of wavelength, as described by the Kramers-Kronig relationship. Furthermore, this spectral variation itself will be a function of pumping. This paper describes an accurate and sensitive experimental determination of the pump dependence of the refractive index in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier. A Mach-Zehnder interferometric measurement is described where only one arm is comprised of doped fiber. Particular attention is paid to accounting for the significant difference in power levels in the two arms and the effects of polarization and incoherent light. The measured refractive-index change matches well with that theoretically predicted. The pumped and unpumped dispersion of the amplifier are calculated. While the extra dispersion is of similar magnitude to that of silica fiber, the impact on long telecommunications systems is likely to be negligible. However, this extra dispersion may be important in shorter systems such as soliton lasers. Given the good agreement between theory and experiment, the variation of dispersion with fractional inversion is calculated from absorption and gain measurements. The presence of codopants is known to alter the absorption and emission spectra; the effect on the dispersion is calculated, and a near linear dependence on germanium concentration is observed.

The delay spread in fibers for SDM transmission: dependence on fiber parameters and perturbations.

Abstract: Contrary to single mode fibers, where random imperfections are responsible for polarization-mode dispersion, modal dispersion (MD) in multi-mode fiber structures for space-division multiplexed (SDM) transmission, originates chiefly from the intrinsic non-degeneracy of the propagating modes, also known as modal birefringence. The presence of random imperfections in such fibers has a positive aspect, as it reduces the intrinsic MD, and in the limit of strong coupling it causes the signal delay spread to increase with the square root of the propagation distance, rather than linearly, as would be the case in an ideal fiber. In this paper we derive a formula that relates the signal delay spread to the fiber geometry and to the statistical properties of the structural fiber perturbations. The derived formula provides insight into the MD phenomenon and facilitates the design of low-MD multi-mode fiber structures.

Numerical comparison between distributed and discrete amplification in a point-to-point 40-Gb/s 40-WDM-Based transmission system with three different modulation formats

Abstract: We describe a detailed numerical investigation on the relative merits of gain flattened distributed Raman amplification (DRA) and discrete gain flattened amplifiers. We simulate a system with forty 40-Gb/s channels spaced at 100 GHz and compare the performance of three different modulation formats nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ), return-to-zero (RZ) and carrier-suppressed RZ (CS-RZ). Three types of amplifiers, multifrequency backward- and forward-pumped DRAs, and an idealized discrete gain flattened amplifier are examined for various signal powers and transmission distances. For the backward-pumped DRA, we also describe calculated tolerance limits imposed by incomplete dispersion slope compensation and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) level.

Optimal Polarization Demultiplexing for Coherent Optical Communications Systems

Abstract: Spectrally-efficient optical communications systems employ polarization division multiplexing (PDM) as a practical solution, in order to double the capacity of a fiber link. Polarization demultiplexing can be performed electronically, using polarization-diversity coherent optical receivers. The primary goal of this paper is the optimal design, using the maximum-likelihood criterion, of polarization-diversity coherent optical receivers for polarization-multiplexed optical signals, in the absence of polarization mode dispersion (PMD). It is shown that simultaneous joint estimation of the symbols, over the two received states of polarization, yields optimal performance, in the absence of phase noise and intermediate frequency offset. In contrast, the commonly used zero-forcing polarization demultiplexer, followed by individual demodulation of the polarization-multiplexed tributaries, exhibits inferior performance, and becomes optimal only if the channel transfer matrix is unitary, e.g., in the absence of polarization dependent loss (PDL), and if the noise components at the polarization diversity branches have equal variances. In this special case, the zero-forcing polarization demultiplexer can be implemented by a 2 ? 2 lattice adaptive filter, which is controlled by only two independent real parameters. These parameters can be computed recursively using the constant modulus algorithm (CMA). We evaluate, by simulation, the performance of the aforementioned zero-forcing polarization demultiplexer in coherent optical communication systems using PDM quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signals. We show that it is, by far, superior, in terms of convergence accuracy and speed, compared to conventional CMA-based polarization demultiplexers. Finally, we experimentally test the robustness of the proposed constrained CMA polarization demultiplexer to realistic imperfections of polarization-diversity coherent optical receivers. The PMD and PDL tolerance of the proposed demultiplexer can be used as a benchmark in order to compare the performance of more sophisticated adaptive electronic PMD/PDL equalizers.

Multichannel tunable dispersion compensation using all-pass multicavity etalons

Abstract: We have proposed and demonstrated a novel approach to multi-channel tunable dispersion compensation using all-pass multi-cavity etalon filters for 10 Gb/s applications.