Uniform polarization scattering with fiber-coil-based polarization controllers

• Author(s): Muga, Nelson J. ; Pinto, Armando Nolasco ; Ferreira, Mário F. S. ; Ferreira da Rocha, José R.
• Date: 2006
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/6649
• Origin: RIA - Repositório Institucional da Universidade de Aveiro
• Subject(s): Polarization controllers (PC); Polarization-mode dispersion (PMD); Polarization scattering.
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

A detailed study of fiber-coil-based polarization controllers (PCs) is performed. First, a method to deterministically calculate the PC configuration in order to transform between any two states of polarization is presented. In a second stage, the case in which the configuration angles are randomly changed is studied. The cases of a single PC and of the system obtained with the concatenation of several PCs are analyzed. For both cases, a general expression for the variance of the Stokes parameters is obtained. Using this expression, it is demonstrated that it is possible to achieve uniform polarization scattering using a concatenation of fiber-coil-based PCs. Finally, it is shown that fiber-coil-based PC's can be used to emulate both, first- and second-order polarization- mode dispersions.