In an optical sampling system for high-speed optical communications, polarization controlling is one of the most important parts of the system, regardless of nonlinear optical sampling or linear optical sampling. A simple method based on variance calculation of sampled data is proposed in this paper to tune the wave plates in a motor-driven polarization controller. In the experiment, an optical sampling system base on SFG in PPLN is carried for a 10Gbit/s or beyond optical data signal. The results demonstrate that, with the proposed method, the error of estimated Q factor from the sampled data is least, and the tuning time of optimized polarization state is less than 30 seconds with the accuracy of ±1°.

Date Published: 5 August 2015
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9619, 2015 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology: Optoelectronic Devices and Optical Signal Processing, 96190V (5 August 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2193517

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9619:
2015 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology: Optoelectronic Devices and Optical Signal Processing
Yi Dong; Chao Lu; Jian Wu; Zhaohui Li, Editor(s)