Free-Space Optical Switches Based on Polarization

摘要

In this paper, a kind of free-space optical switch based on polarization was proposed. Its operation principle was described in detail. Based on this method, some basic types of optical switches were presented, such as 1 X2, 2X1 and 2X2 optical switches. Then, taken as an example, the 1X2 type was tested to give the experiment performance of this kind of free-space optical switch based on polarization. Its insertion loss was less than 3dB, crosstalk between different channels were as low as -32dB, and its switching time was about 2ms. It showed that this kind of optical switches could be well used in OADM for optical networks protection and reconfiguration. Also its disadvantages were discussed at the end of this paper.