<title>Multichannel optical PMD compensator</title>

Abstract

We report for the first time a multichannel in-line PMD compensator which independently provides higher-order PMD compensation for each DWDM channel in the C band. Feedforward compensation is implemented through a robust optimization algorithm using high-speed, high-resolution spectral polarimetric data for each channel. Both 10 and 40 Gb/sec 40-channel 100-GHz compensators are reported, and extensive test results over a range of secondorder PMD conditions are presented.