scope:

This part of IEC 61290 applies to alle commercially available optical amplifiers (OAs) including optical fibre amplifiers (OFAs) using active fibres and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) using semiconductor gain media. Polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) causes an optical pulse to spread in the time domain. This dispersion could impair the performance of a telefommunications system. The effect can be related to differential group velocity and corresponding arrival times of different polarization components of the signal. For a narrowband source, the effect can be related to a differential group delay (DGD) between pairs of orthogonally polarized principal states of polarization (PSP).