Quasi-distributed birefringence dispersion measurement for polarization maintain device with high accuracy based on white light interferometry

A white light temporal interferometric technique for measurement of the quasi-distributed birefringence dispersion (BD) in a polarization maintain (PM) device with high accuracy based on weighted least square (WLS) method is presented. It is verified theoretically and experimentally that the accuracy of WLS method and the conventional ordinary least square (OLS) method both are proportional to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of interferogram, whereas the WLS method holds a higher scaling factor because it is more suitable for heteroscedastic model that has unequal error variance. The experiment results show a repeatability of similar to 4.6 x 10(-5) ps/nm @ 1550 nm with WLS method for 100 sets of data, and similar to 4.3 x 10(-4) ps/nm with OLS method, for an interferogram with SNR of 30 dB. Besides, WLS method without iterative operation is carried out by using power spectrum of interferogram as weight value. The feasibility of this technique is demonstrated by distinguishing the quasi-distributed BD of every part for a packaged Y-waveguide with two 1m-long PM pigtails. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America