Polarization statistics of crosstalk-induced noise in transparent lightwave networks

In transparent lightwave networks, small component-crosstalk imperfections are known to generate interferometric noise levels that are significant under the worst case of matched signal and crosstalk polarizations, but vanish for orthogonal polarizations. We show that, contrary to intuition, performance under random polarizations is skewed toward worst-case, and that deployed networks must accordingly be designed for it.<>