POLARIZATION SCRAMBLING USING A SHORT PIECE OF HIGH-BIREFRINGENCE OPTICAL-FIBER AND A MULTIFREQUENCY LASER-DIODE

This paper describes a technique for avoiding system performance degra dation and outages in an optical fiber system due to state of polariza tion mismatch between signal and polarization-sensitive system compone nts. The technique uses a short piece of high-birefringence fiber and a multifrequency laser to create a depolarized source that can be used to transmit data without fading.