Nondeterministic endless control system for active polarization control

An active polarization-state control system is described for use in coherent fiber-optic communication systems. The active control system uses four piezostack fiber squeezers to enable control of the state of polarization (SOP) of the light over an unlimited range. The response time of the system is small enough to enable accurate tracking of changes in the SOP at a rate of up to 25 revolutions per second in the Poincare sphere representation. Unlimited control is achieved with a nondeterministic control algorithm. This makes the system insensitive to irregularities and unbounded instabilities of the control devices (e.g. drift). Experiments show that the SOP is accurately controlled by the system; the penalty loss due to residual mismatch in SOP is kept well below 1 dB even under dynamic circumstances.>