All-fiber Mach–Zehnder interferometer for DWDM filter direct group-delay measurement

The group delay of the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) filter is becoming more important in optical communication. This study proposes a Mach–Zehnder interferometer based on the direct group delay measurement of an optical thin film filter. The interferometer provides a simple, accurate and physically intuitive picture of what happens to broadband optical pulses on common optical materials. A 100 GHz DWDM filter was used as an example in the measurement and showed that the time of measurement and selection of Gaussian window were two important factors.