Automated fusion-splicing of polarization maintaining fibers

An advanced splicing technique for polarization maintaining (PM) fibers has been derived based on the polarization observation by lens-effect-tracing (POL) method. With this technique, azimuthal alignment on common types of PM fibers can be automatically performed in a passive way by an automated fusion splicer. Because the method permits an accurate estimation of the splice's extinction ratio before and after actual splicing, the quality of the splice call be estimated without having to make an active measurement. The experiment results illustrated in the paper show a mean extinction ratio 32.2 with 2.73 dB standard deviation and mean difference between measured and estimated extinction ratio 0.18 dB, respectively, for six different types of PM fibers.