Abstract

Recently, the application of polarization-maintaining (PM) optical fibers¹ has been spreading to inter-connection of laser diodes and polarization sensitive devices. For PM fibers, we need a sophisticated and cost-effective method of measuring the modal birefringence. The modal birefringence B is defined as a difference between effective indices of two polarized eigenmodes. Wavelength scanning (WS) method² is commonly employed because of its convenience and good repeatability. The conventional WS method, however, ignores the wavelength dependence of B, that is, we substitute the difference of group indices for B. In this paper, we investigate the wavelength dependence of the modal birefringence of PANDA fibers,¹ and propose a method to convert a measured data by the WS method into the modal birefringence.

© 1995 IEEE