PMD Measurement of Hollow-Core Photonic Bandgap Fiber by Investigating Power Penalty of Optically Generated Microwave Signals

A simple method based on carrier suppression modulation for measuring first-order polarization-mode dispersion of hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (HC-PBGF) is proposed and investigated. By adjusting the incident optical wavelength and measuring the power penalty of optically generated microwave signals, the wavelength-dependent differential group delay (DGD) in HC-PBGF can be obtained. Moreover, this proposed method is chromatic-dispersion-insensitive. The experimental results indicate that a segment of 20-m HC-PBGF exhibits highly birefringent DGD of 25, 59, and 84 ps with measurement error less than 2 ps for the incident optical wavelength of 1560, 1575, and 1580 nm, respectively