Stability analysis of polarization attraction in optical fibers

Abstract

The nonlinear cross-polarization interaction among two intense counterpropagating beams in a span of lossless randomly birefringent telecom optical fiber may lead to the attraction an initially polarization scrambled signal towards wave with a well-defined state of polarization at the fiber output. By exploiting exact analytical solutions of the nonlinear polarization coupling process we carry out a linear stability study which reveals that temporally stable stationary solutions are only obtained whenever the output signal polarization is nearly orthogonal to the input pump polarization. Moreover, we predict that polarization attraction is acting in full strength whenever equally intense signal and pump waves are used.