Optical field recovery in stokes space

Abstract

Coherent detection empowers optical receivers the capability of recovering the optical field propagating through the fiber. Field recovery not only increases the degree of freedom for optical modulations, but also enables the digital compensation of fiber dispersion that avoids the sophisticated optical dispersion management. Compared with coherent detection, direct detection (DD) owns a natural advantage - the simplicity, but lacks the capability of field recovery. To increase the modulation dimension for DD, the recent development of Stokes vector receiver takes the advantage of polarization diversity and extends the modulation dimension up to three-dimension with reference to the four-dim..