High-resolution measurement of polarization dependent loss

Polarization-dependent loss (PDL) is the dependence of insertion loss on the state of polarization (SOP) of the input light. Previous efforts to measure PDL of components had an uncertainty of more than 0.01 dB, primarily due to the PDL of the measurement equipment itself. A method that uses an erbium-doped-fiber depolarizer, resulting in a test set with an uncertainty of+or-0.001 dB, is presented. >