Effect of first-order PMD compensation on the statistics of pulse broadening in a fiber with randomly varying birefringence

Polarization mode dispersion in standard telecommunication fibers can be compensated to first order by using the concept of principal states of polarization. At the receiver the pulse is decomposed into the two waveforms polarized along the two principal states for the optical link and their delay is removed. We show by Monte Carlo simulation that compensation sharpens the probability distribution function of the pulse durations by a factor that decreases with increasing polarization dispersion.