Applications of Polarization-Maintaining Beam Splitters/Combiners
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Fiber-optic Polarization Beam Combiners (PBCs) or Polarization Beam Splitters (PBSs) are used to couple two orthogonally polarized light beams into a single fiber, or to separately couple the orthogonal linearly polarized light contained within a single fiber into two polarization-maintaining (PM) fibers, with the polarization direction aligned parallel to the slow axis of the PM fibers. The dual-fiber ports (Port 1 and Port 2) are PM fibers; the single-fiber port (Port 3) is a standard single-mode fiber, which can also be a PM fiber.
Polarization-maintaining fiber splitters have a wide range of applications in optical communications. They can split an optical signal into multiple output signals, used to implement functions such as branching, multiplexing, and monitoring in fiber optic communication networks. At the same time, polarization-maintaining fiber splitters can keep the polarization state of the optical signal unchanged, thereby improving the transmission performance and stability of the optical communication system.
Beam combiners: Merge two input optical signals into one output signal, also requiring the polarization states of the individual light paths to be maintained.
Their most important value lies in “polarization-maintaining.” In standard single-mode fibers, the polarization state of light changes randomly during transmission, which is detrimental for many polarization-sensitive applications. Polarization-maintaining fibers, by introducing stress and special structures (such as Panda-type or Bow-tie type), can maintain a stable linear polarization for transmission. Polarization-maintaining splitters/combiners build upon this to achieve the unification of optical path splitting/combining and polarization preservation.
