Polarization-mode dispersion emulation with Maxwellian lengths and importance sampling

We describe an efficient polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) emulation method that combines a concatenation of birefringent sections having Maxwellian-distributed lengths with importance sampling. The method generates PMD statistics with accurate tail distributions using relatively few sections and reasonable numbers of samples, and allows the targeting of specific, arbitrarily large, first- and second-order PMD values.