Hi to the group. I am a physicist, I graduated in optics, and now I am working at a project in telecommunications. So I am working with fiber optics, but I have little experience with them.
In particular I am working with some components "polarization dependent" (a Polarizing Beam Splitter), connected with Polarization Maintaining fiber. I think there is something I don't understand about the behavior of the PM fiber.
What I understood was that this fiber imposes 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, the fiber itself will attenuate all the other polarization component, letting pass only the polarization component parallel to the principal (transverse) axe of it's asymmetrical core.
In another case, if I put a linearly polarized light, with a direction different to the one "preferred" by the fiber, ideally only the "preferred component" will propagaate, but actually a little component out of the direction will survive, and the light will become elliptically polarized.
About my optical component, the PBS, If it was true, the fiber itself would bring the light with the "right" polarization to the two right ports, since the fiber ends have been glued in two orthogonal directions. But this doesn't work.
So now I am suspecting that my understanding was wrong or imprecise.
Now, after some experiments, I am guessing that the PM fiber just "freezes" the polarization in the direction with which it comes in.
Could someone help me, either with answers, or telling me where to find some matherial (book, scientific article, fiber producer's white paper, web pages..)
thank you for any kind of help