The effect of the frequency dependence of PMD on the performance of optical communications systems

The authors study numerically the importance of the frequency dependence of the polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) vector to the operation of optical systems and evaluate the validity of the second-order PMD approximation. They show that there is no relevant range of parameters in which the second-order PMD approximation is useful and question the validity of considering discrete high-orders of PMD.