Design and realization of phase retardation-control polarization controllers based on artificial birefringence

Polarization controllers (PCs) are indispensable passive components for state of polarization (SOP) control in optical fiber communication systems. In order to overcome the disadvantages of existing polarization controller (PC), a novel PC based on the artificial birefringence is designed in this paper. The PC results from the concatenation of 3 phase retardation control units each of which consists of two polarization beam splitters, two prisms and one piezoz-lectric transducer (PZT) piezoelectric ceramic. The experimental results show that the proposed PC can convert an arbitrary input SOP to any expected output one with high accuracy under low control voltage.