Abstract
Long optical-fiber transmission paths, which use erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), are subject to degraded performance caused by polarization hole burning (PHB) in the amplifiers. Performance degradation, first observed by Taylor1, was later attributed to PHB by Mazurczyk and Zyskind.2 In a chain of saturated amplifiers, PHB can cause the amplified-spontaneous-emission (ASE) noise to accumulate in the polarization orthogonal to the signal faster than along the parallel axis. Thus noise can grow at the expense of the signal faster than would be predicted according to simple ASE-noise-accumulation theory. The deleterious effects of PHB can be avoided by modulating (or scrambling) the state of polarization (SOP) of the data signal faster than the EDFA can respond to polarization changes. In this paper the range of usable scrambling frequencies is determined by measuring the characteristic PHB time constant of a typical EDFA.
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