Elliptically birefringent optical fiber transmission characteristics

This paper presents a rigorous analysis of spun hi-bi (highly birefringent) fibers, loosely categorized as elliptically bi fibers, via the initial value problem approach. Two kinds of transmission problem are treated. In the single-eigenmode transmission regime, it is found that the major technological difficulty inherent to spun hi-bi fibers concerns excitation of the eigenmode, which strictly requires that the launched light be exactly oriented in conformity with one or the other local principal axes of the fiber and, meanwhile, that the ellipticity of the launched light be exactly equal to the eigen-ellipticity of the same fiber. In the second kind of problem that involves the interaction of two eigenmodes, a basic result is derived to show that an arbitrary polarization mode of excitation will reproduce itself in integer multiples of the local beat length. Such a kind of transmission regime is relieved of the excitation difficulty but, because of being severely length-sensitive, is inherently impractical from the application viewpoint.