Quasi-monochromatic fiber depolarizer and its application to polarization-dependent loss measurement

We theoretically derive the relationship between the degrees of polarization (DOPs) of input and output for an optical component with polarization-dependent loss (PDL) and birefringence. Based on the theoretical result, we propose a novel depolarizer for quasi-monochromatic light that can depolarize a fully polarized light with a 50 MHz linewidth to less than 0.2% in the DOP The depolarized light is then used to measure PDL in a single-mode optical fiber link. To the best of our knowledge, our new PDL measurement method is significantly faster than all known methods. Experimental results show excellent agreement with other methods.