Wideband All-Order PMD Emulation via Ultrafast Pulse Shaping

H. Miao and A. M. Weiner Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 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 birefringent 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 birefringent 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 nm 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. Fig. 1 shows our experimental setup for PMD emulation and measurement. The pulse shaper acting as PMD emulator incorporates liquid crystal modulator arrays (LCM) with a total of 4 layers. Each layer functions as a 128-pixel linear retarder array with fixed axes and adjustable retardances. The orientations of the axes of the 4 LCM layers are 0, 45, 0 and 90 degrees, respectively. With this geometry, the pulse shaper can generate any desired unitary Jones matrices. To do PMD emulation, we first simulate a fiber with 5 ps mean DGD as a concatenation of 100 randomly oriented linearly birefringent fiber sections, then store the simulated frequency-dependent PMD vector and program the pulse shaper to produce the corresponding frequency dependent Jones matrices. To check the performance of the PMD emulator, we measured the generated PMD vectors. For testing we use a broadband ASE source followed by a polarizer and a switchable ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) retarder to generate horizontal linear and right hand circular (RHC) input signals. By sensing the corresponding output SOPs with our wavelength-parallel polarimeter and applying the Muller matrix method (MMM), we measure the frequency-dependent PMD vectors. Fig. 2 shows the results of an experimental trial. Since PMD is represented by a frequency-dependent 3x1 vector in Stokes space, we plot the magnitude (DGD) and the three Stokes components (1, 2, and 3) of the PMD vectors. The measured PMD vectors generated by the emulator are close to the desired (simulated) PMD vectors. We repeated the experiments more than 20 times using different PMD profiles derived from simulation. Each time the measured PMD profile is similarly close to the desired profile, which confirms the capability for all-order PMD emulation. In conclusion, we have demonstrated a pulse shaper based PMD emulator with the capability of generating arbitrary desired frequency-dependent PMD profiles.

Fig. 1. Experimental setup.

Fig. 2. A comparison between measured (dotted curves) and desired PMD (solid curves) profiles.

References: 1. H. Kogelnik, R.M. Jopson, L.E. Nelson, Polarization Mode Dispersion in Optical Fiber Telecommunications IVB-Systems and Impairments, I.P. Kaminow and T.Li, ed., Academic Press, 2002. 2. A. M. Weiner, Femtosecond pulse shaping using spatial light modulators, Review of Scientific Instruments, 71, 1929-1960 (2000).