Spectral-domain measurement of phase modal birefringence in polarization-maintaining fiber.

We report on a new and simple method for measuring the wavelength dependence of phase modal birefringence in a polarizationmaintaining fiber. The method is based on application of a lateral pointlike force on the fiber that causes strong coupling between polarization modes and utilizes their interference resolved as the channeled spectrum. The change of the phase retrieved from two recorded channeled spectra that are associated with the known displacement of coupling point is used to determine the phase modal birefringence as a function of wavelength. A windowed Fourier transform is applied to reconstruct precisely the phase change and the phase ambiguity is removed provided that we know the phase change of the spectral fringes at one specific wavelength. The measured wavelength dependence of phase modal birefringence is compared with that resulting from the group modal birefringence measurement.

[1]  W. Bock,et al.  Measurement of polarization mode dispersion and modal birefringence in highly birefringent fibers by means of electronically scanned shearing-type interferometry. , 1993, Applied optics.

[2]  R Ulrich,et al.  Precision measurement of modal birefringence of highly birefringent fibers by periodic lateral force. , 1985, Applied optics.

[3]  Petr Hlubina,et al.  Evaluation of spectral modulated interferograms using a Fourier transform and the iterative phase-locked loop method , 2003 .

[4]  Roy McBride,et al.  Dispersion of birefringence and differential group delay in polarization-maintaining fiber. , 2002, Optics letters.

[5]  Wencai Jing,et al.  Distributed measurement of birefringence dispersion in polarization-maintaining fibers. , 2006, Optics letters.

[6]  Tadeusz Martynkien,et al.  Measurements of birefringence and its sensitivity to hydrostatic pressure and elongation in photonic bandgap hollow core fiber with residual core ellipticity , 2005 .

[7]  Dalibor Ciprian,et al.  Windowed Fourier transform applied in the wavelength domain to process the spectral interference signals , 2008 .

[8]  W. Bock,et al.  Dispersion effects in elliptical-core highly birefringent fibers. , 2001, Applied optics.

[9]  S C Rashleigh.  Wavelength dependence of birefringence in highly birefringent fibers. , 1982, Optics letters.

[10]  Petr Hlubina.  White-light spectral interferometry to measure intermodal dispersion in two-mode elliptical-core optical fibres , 2003 .

[11]  M G Shlyagin,et al.  Birefringence dispersion measurement in optical fibers by wavelength scanning. , 1995, Optics letters.

[12]  Petr Hlubina,et al.  Dispersion of group and phase modal birefringence in elliptical-core fiber measured by white-light spectral interferometry. , 2003, Optics express.