An adaptive polarization controller (APC) is crucial in mitigating carrier fading in a self-homodyne coherent detection (SHCD) system. In this paper, we propose a simplified APC design based on the X-cut, Y-propagating lithium niobate platform. Meanwhile, the alpha-beta filter is used to control the designed APC. The designed APC only needs one phase shifter to perform reset-free polarization stabilization. At the same time, it is the first time the alpha-beta filter has been used in the polarization control area. The results demonstrate that the alpha-beta filter outperforms the traditional greedy linear descent (GLD) algorithm in terms of both tracking limit and stability. Over a fiber transmission distance of 10 km, the designed APC enables the system to withstand a rotation of the state of polarization (RSOP) of 100 krad/s while maintaining a bit error rate (BER) below the forward error correction (FEC) threshold.
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