Non-Maxwellian probability density function of fibers with lumped polarization mode dispersion elements

We give an analytical expression for the probability density function of the differential group delay for a concatenation of Maxwellian fiber sections and an arbitrary number of lumped elements with constant and isotropically oriented birefringence. When the contribution of the average squared of the constant birefringence elements is a significant fraction of the total, we show that the outage probability can be significantly overestimated if the probability density function of the differential group delay is approximated by a Maxwellian distribution.