Pulsewidth distortion monitoring in a 40-Gb/s optical system affected by PMD

A novel technique for monitoring the pulse broadening due to polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) in optical systems is described. The technique is based on the measurement of the Stokes vectors at different frequencies over the spectrum of the received optical pulse find does not require a priori knowledge of the fiber PMD statistics or details of the optical path. The validity of our technique has been demonstrated by both simulation and experimental results.