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

Summary form only given. Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) limits the transmission of high bit-rate optical signals in fiber. Polarization dispersion can be compensated to first order by breaking up the signal into the two principal states and removing the differential group delay between the two states either electronically or optically. Because PMD is random, it is important to know how compensation changes the statistics of pulse broadening. We use Monte Carlo simulations to show that the compensator decreases both the mean and the variance of pulse durations by an amount that depends on the ratio of the fiber length to the PMD length.