EVS-EN 61290-11-1:2008

his part of IEC 61290 applies to all commercially available optical amplifiers (OAs), including optical fibre amplifiers (OFAs) using active fibres, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), and planar waveguide optical amplifiers (PWOAs). Polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) causes an optical pulse to spread in the time domain. This dispersion could impair the performance of a telecommunications system. The effect can be related to differential group velocity and corresponding arrival times of different polarization components of the signal. For a narrowband source, the effect can be related to a differential group delay (DGD) between pairs of orthogonally polarized principal states of polarization (PSP). Other information about PMD may be found in IEC 61282-9 in general and in IEC 61292-5 on OAs in particular.