Abstract: Polarization dependent loss has been attracting growing amounts of attention in recent years. The prime reason for this has been the development of long terrestrial communication links where the number of inline components contributing to PDL is large, and where cost constraints prevent the selection of ultra-low PDL devices, as is commonly done in the undersea cable world. There are two major ways in which PDL affects the performance of a fiber-optic link. The first has to do with the distortion of the signal to noise ratio which we have studied extensively in the past. The second is by distorting the transmitted waveform in a nontrivial interaction with the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) of the link. The previous few studies of the latter effect demonstrated the complexity of the problem and argued about the potentially detrimental effect that PDL-induced waveform distortions may have on the performance of optical communications systems. In this work we proceed with the study of the combined PMD and PDL phenomenon, and present a new and very simple angle on considering and interpreting the effect on the optical waveform. While the nature of the distortions is interesting in its character and can be of importance in certain situations, it is demonstrated, by an analytical and numerical study, that in an optical communications setting the significance of PDL as a waveform distorting mechanism is considerably smaller than its significance as a mechanism that affects the SNR.

Biographical Sketch:: Mark Shtaif received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at the Technion in Haifa, Israel in 1993 and 1997, respectively. In 1997 he joined the Light-wave Networks Research Department at AT&T Labs Research in New Jersey as Senior and then Principal Member of Technical Staff. In December 2001 he became a Principal Architect in Celion Networks, an optical networking company based in New Jersey and Texas, where he worked on the analysis and design of long-haul optical transmission systems. In April 2002 he joined the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His main activities are related to modeling and characterization of optical fiber communication systems focusing on propagation effects in optical fibers including fiber nonlinearities, polarization mode dispersion, special modulation formats and interaction of signals and noise.

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