Effect of first-order PMD compensation on the statistics of pulse broadening in a fiber with randomly varying birefringence

Polarization mode dispersion in standard telecommunication fibers can be co mpensated to first order by using the concept of principal states of polari zation. At the receiver the pulse is decomposed into the two waveforms pola rized along the two principal states for the optical link and their delay i s removed. We show by Monte Carlo simulation that compensation sharpens the probability distribution function of the pulse durations by a factor that decreases with increasing polarization dispersion.