Abstract

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) remains a challenge in high-speed optical fiber telecommunication systems [1], PMD arises from the random birefringences in optical fibers due to the imperfect asymmetry in the fiber core. This results in time-stochastic and wavelength-dependent variation of the states of polarization (SOPs) and delays, which may degrade the system capacity. To characterize PMD induced system outages in the lab, it is essential to have a PMD emulator that can quickly generate frequency dependent PMD profiles expected in optical fiber links. Most current PMD emulators are constructed by using several biréfringent segments with either fixed differential group delay (DGD) or variable DGD. The stochastic feature of PMD is generated by adjusting the orientation of these segments. The drawbacks are: (1) a large amount of biréfringent segments is necessary to emulate the frequency dependent and time-stochastic features of the PMD in real fiber links; (2) it is extremely difficult to generate an arbitrary PMD profile in the “all-order” regime. In this paper, we treat all-order PMD effects as frequency dependent Jones matrices. By employing pulse shaping technique [2] to generate the desired Jones matrices in parallel on a wavelength-by-wavelength basis, we demonstrate a wideband all-order PMD emulator, which can produce any desired PMD frame with an electronics-limited response time of ~ 500 ms. Our PMD emulator provides a bandwidth of 8 mn at a spectral resolution of ~ 10 GHz. Our emulator is similar to an apparatus we have recently demonstrated for all-order PMD compensation, but operated in reverse.

© 2007 IEEE