Specialty Polarization Maintaining Optical Fiber Low Transmission Loss PM Fibers 1310 nm

Polarization-Maintaining Optical Fiber

Polarization-Maintaining Optical Fiber: Exceptional Features and Versatile Applications Polarization-maintaining optical fiber stands out as a remarkable specialty fiber, playing a crucial role in numerous high-tech fields with a host of unique advantages and extensive application scenarios.
I. Outstanding Product Features
(A) High Polarization-Maintaining Capability This fiber is highly effective in maintaining the polarization state of light, significantly reducing the random variation in polarization caused by external environmental factors such as temperature changes and stress. Its special structural design, like incorporating stress-applying components around the core or using specific material combinations, creates a fixed birefringence effect within the fiber. This birefringence acts as a stable "track" for the polarization state of light, ensuring that light travels in a specific polarized direction during transmission. The polarization extinction ratio can typically reach above 30 dB, providing reliable support for optical communication and sensing systems that are sensitive to polarization states.
(B) Low Transmission Loss During the transmission of optical signals, polarization-maintaining optical fiber exhibits excellent low-loss characteristics. By using high-purity raw materials and advanced manufacturing processes, it effectively reduces the absorption and scattering of light by the fiber. Generally, in the commonly used communication wavelength range (such as the 1550 nm band), the transmission loss per kilometer can be controlled within 0.2 dB. This means that optical signals can maintain strong intensity over longer distances, reducing the reliance on repeater and other signal-boosting devices. It thus lowers the system construction cost and maintenance complexity, while enhancing the overall reliability and stability of the system.
(C) Good Mechanical Properties Polarization-maintaining optical fiber has outstanding mechanical strength and flexibility, enabling it to adapt to various complex installation and usage environments. Whether it is bent and routed in a confined space or subjected to a certain degree of tensile and compressive forces, it can maintain the stability of its optical performance. The cladding material usually has high strength and abrasion resistance, and the slender structure of the fiber itself endows it with good flexibility. This makes the laying, connection, and integration of the fiber more convenient and efficient, less prone to performance degradation due to mechanical damage, effectively prolonging the service life of the fiber and reducing the risk of system downtime caused by fiber failures.
(D) Compatibility with Existing Optical Communication Systems Polarization-maintaining optical fiber can be well integrated with existing optical communication infrastructure and equipment. It can seamlessly interface with conventional optical transmitters, receivers, optical amplifiers, and various passive optical components without requiring a large-scale retrofit or redesign of the entire system. This compatibility allows polarization-maintaining optical fiber to be easily incorporated into existing optical communication networks, providing a flexible and cost-effective solution for network upgrades and optimization. Whether in long-haul trunk communication, metro network construction, or access network expansion, polarization-maintaining optical fiber can fully utilize its polarization-maintaining advantage to enhance the performance and capacity of the entire optical communication system.

II. Applications
(A) Fiber Optic Gyroscope In the field of inertial navigation, the fiber optic gyroscope is a significant application of polarization-maintaining optical fiber. Based on the Sagnac effect, the fiber optic gyroscope detects the phase difference between light propagating clockwise and counterclockwise in a ring-shaped fiber due to rotation to determine the angular velocity of an object. The high polarization-maintaining ability of the fiber ensures that the polarization state of light remains stable in the sensitive ring of the gyroscope, enabling precise measurement of minute phase changes and achieving high-precision angular velocity detection. Compared with traditional mechanical gyroscopes, fiber optic gyroscopes have the advantages of small size, light weight, high precision, strong reliability, and good resistance to shock and vibration. They are widely used in aerospace, marine, land navigation, and military fields, playing an essential role in systems such as aircraft attitude control, ship heading stabilization, and missile precision guidance.
(B) Coherent Optical Communication With the development of optical communication technology towards higher speed and larger capacity, coherent optical communication technology has gradually become mainstream. In a coherent optical communication system, precise control of the polarization state of light is required for efficient signal modulation, demodulation, and coherent detection. Polarization-maintaining optical fiber provides an ideal transmission medium for coherent optical communication. It ensures the stability of the polarization state of optical signals during long-distance transmission, allowing the receiving end to accurately recover the original signal. By using polarization-maintaining optical fiber, coherent optical communication systems can effectively improve spectral efficiency, reduce the bit error rate of signals, and achieve ultra-high-speed data transmission. For example, it is widely used in high-speed optical communication systems of 100 Gbps and above, powerfully promoting the high-speed transmission of global Internet data and the rapid development of emerging services such as cloud computing and big data.
(C) Optical Fiber Sensing In the field of optical fiber sensing, polarization-maintaining optical fiber also has broad application prospects. Since it can sensitively detect the influence of external physical quantities (such as stress, temperature, magnetic field, etc.) on the polarization state of light, it can be used to construct various high-precision optical fiber sensors. For instance, in stress sensing, when an external stress is applied to the polarization-maintaining optical fiber, it changes the birefringence characteristics inside the fiber, which in turn leads to a change in the polarization state of light. By detecting this change in polarization state, the magnitude and distribution of stress can be accurately measured. In power systems, it can be used to monitor the stress state of power cables and prevent cable damage due to overload. In structural health monitoring of bridges, buildings, etc., it can sense minute deformations and stress changes in real-time, providing an important basis for ensuring engineering safety. Additionally, in magnetic field sensing, temperature sensing, etc., polarization-maintaining optical fiber can also convert changes in external physical quantities into detectable signals of the polarization state of light through special material coatings or structural designs, realizing distributed, high-precision sensing of multiple physical quantities. It has potential application value in numerous fields such as industrial automation, environmental monitoring, and biomedicine.
(D) Quantum Communication As a communication technology with extremely high security, polarization-maintaining optical fiber plays an important role in quantum communication. In a quantum key distribution system, the polarization state of photons is used to encode quantum information. Polarization-maintaining optical fiber can ensure that the polarization state of photons is not disturbed during transmission, thereby guaranteeing the security and accuracy of quantum keys. Its low-loss property enables quantum signals to be effectively transmitted over longer distances, laying the foundation for constructing long-distance quantum communication networks. With the continuous development and improvement of quantum communication technology, polarization-maintaining optical fiber is expected to play an even more crucial role in future frontier fields such as quantum secure communication and quantum computing, propelling global information security technology to new heights. Polarization-maintaining optical fiber, with its unique product features, demonstrates irreplaceable significance in fiber optic gyroscopes, coherent optical communication, optical fiber sensing, quantum communication, and other fields. It provides strong support for the progress and innovation of modern technology. And with the continuous development of technology, its application fields will continue to expand and deepen, contributing more to humanity's exploration of the unknown world and the construction of a more intelligent and efficient information society.