Automated fusion-splicing of polarization maintaining fibers

An advanced splicing technique for polarization maintaining (PM) fibers has been derived based on the polarization observation by lens-effect-tracing (POL) method. With this technique, azimuthal alignment on common types of PM fibers can be automatically performed in a passive way by an automated fusion splicer. Because the method permits an accurate estimation of the splice´s extinction ratio before and after actual splicing, the quality of the splice call be estimated without having to make an active measurement. The experiment results illustrated in the paper show a mean extinction ratio 32.2 with 2.73 dB standard deviation and mean difference between measured and estimated extinction ratio 0.18 dB, respectively, for six different types of PM fibers