scope:

This part of 61290 applies to all 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 telecommunications 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). This test method describes a procedure for measuring the PMD aof OAa. The measurement result is obtained from the measurement of the normalized Stokes parameters at two closely spaced wavelengths.