All About Polarization-maintaining Fibers

Optical fibers even if have a circularly symmetric design always exhibit some degree of birefringence because in practice you will always find some amount of mechanical stress or other effects which break the symmetry. The polarization maintaining of light changes in an uncontrolled way gradually.

Principle of Polarization-maintaining Fibers

By using a polarization-maintaining fiber the above problem can be fixed and it is not a fiber without birefringence but on the contrary a specialty fiber with a strong built-in birefringence (high-birefringence fiber or HIBI fiber, PM fiber). The polarization maintaining splitter of light which is launched into the fiber is aligned with one of the birefringent axes and even if the fiber is bent this polarization state will be preserved. The physical principle present behind this can only be understood in terms of coherent mode coupling. Due to the strong birefringence, the propagation constants of the two polarization modes are significantly different and because of it the relative phase of such co-propagating modes rapidly drifts away. During heating, the fibers are slowly stretched and tapered.

Therefore, both modes get effectively coupled by any disturbance along with the fiber and it takes place only if it has a significant spatial Fourier component with a wavenumber matching the propagation constants difference in two polarization modes. The usual disturbances in the fiber are too slowly varying to do effective mode coupling only if the difference is huge. In quantitative terms, compared to the typical length scale on which the parasitic birefringence varies the polarization beat length needs to be significantly shorter.

Few Ways of Realizing Polarization-maintaining Fibers

On the opposite sides performance on of the core, for introducing strong birefringence a commonly used method is including two stress rods of the modified glass composition. One can make bow-tie fiber with different techniques, where the stress elements have a different shape and reach closer to the fiber core so that you can get a stronger polarization maintaining circulator. Due to the strong birefringence, the propagation constants of the two polarization modes are significantly different and because of it the relative phase of such co-propagating modes rapidly drifts away.