Hi to all. I am a physicist, I worked mainly with free air setups, and few time ago I started to work to a new project, using fiber optics. I need to understand better the behavior of the polarization maintaining fiber. What I understood was that this fiber does is to impose to the light to propagate with linear polarization, and with a predetermined polarization direction.
In other words If I put a non polarized light in this fiber, it will attenuate all the other component, letting pass only the polarization component parallel to the principal (transverse) axes of it's asymmetrical core.
But I am suspecting that my understanding was wrong or imprecise.
Now, after some experiments, I am understanding that the PM fiber just "freezes" the polarization in the direction with which it comes in.
Could someone help me, either with an answer or with some documentation (a book, an article, a web page, a producer's white paper...)
thank you