Time-domain polarization interleaving of signal to allow polarization-insensitive all-optical clock recovery

This letter presents a novel scheme for polarization-insensitive optical clock recovery by preconditioning the data signal at the transmitter side. The polarization-insensitivity is realized by making the polarizations of two channels orthogonal in the second stage of optical time-domain multiplexing. A 38-GHz optical clock was recovered from the incoming data stream using a passively mode-locked multisection laser diode. The results show that the performance of the recovered 38-GHz clock is extremely insensitive to the polarization state of the incoming data.