A NEW POLARIZATION-DEPENDENT LOSS MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

We report a novel and accurate method to determine the polarization de pendent loss (PDL) of fibre and bulk optical components. Unlike other methods reported so far, this does not require the use of sophisticate d sub-systems such as a full polarimeter or a precision probe polariza tion state generator. Instead, it uses liquid crystal cells to generat e a complete set of polarization states, a free-space, polarization in dependent, beam-splitter to generate sample and reference beams, and p yroelectric detectors as polarization independent power sensors. Our s ystems has a repeatability of +/-0.003dB for measurement of PDL.