The growing demand for advanced data, voice, and video transmitted through optical fibers has paved the way for a number of technological advances and solutions that increase bandwidth. Some of the more progressive solutions utilize polarization maintaining fibers, which has led to the exponential growth of its use and adoption within the industry. Polarization maintaining (PM) fibers are manufactured with high birefringence, which creates two perpendicular axes (typically referred to as the fast and slow axes) in which light can travel. The birefringence allows the polarization state of light to be controlled and manipulated. In order to take advantage of new advanced technologies, studies should focus on the ability to splice PM fiber to any other fiber to determine optimal splice conditions. This study will explain PM fiber, the applications that are most commonly using this fiber, improvements in heterogeneous and homogeneous splicing through the use of an extinction ratio (ER) feedback system, the benefits of aligning the polarization planes using an optical verification system (ER feedback) versus geometric profile alignment (image processing), ER estimation, and reductions in splicing cycle time. As the production of components that contain PM fiber moves from the lab to the manufacturing floor a number of process flow issues arise. Therefore, this study will also show how the ER feedback system will help reduce the number of steps required in the manufacturing and testing of optical components containing PM fiber. The extinction ratio is a measurement of the optical power traveling in the slow versus the fast axes. In order to splice PM fibers, splicing equipment must be able to align the polarization axes while achieving horizontal and vertical core alignment. Typically, fusion splicing equipment relies solely on image processing to view and align each fiber being spliced. This process aligns the geometric properties of the fiber, however, the optical path may differ resulting in decreases in the extinction ratio. With the variety of possible PM applications that are forthcoming improving the PM splicing process is desirable.
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