The effects of XPM-induced fast polarization-state fluctuations on PMD compensated WDM systems

We show numerically and experimentally the system degradation caused by cross-phase modulation-induced fast polarization fluctuations in wavelength-division-multiplexing systems that use polarization-mode dispersion compensation. A simple pump-probe model is used to investigate this effect and a technique is proposed to mitigate this problem. For a 10-Gb/s system with a 40-ps differential group delay compensator, the significant improvement is achieved over standard systems by using this technology.