Study of the stability of polarization mode dispersion in fibre

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is the ultimate limitation to high bit-rate fibre communication system. The stability of PMD is very important to its measurement and compensation. This paper puts forward a method to measure the stability of PMD by measuring the stability of the state of polarization (SOP) and introduces the conception of time evolution vector (TEV) of SOP. We observe the fact that the regularity of the principal state of polarization changing with time is the same as other SOPs', if we neglect the dependence of TEV on wavelength. We also measure the SOP's stability of some fibres with different lengths, and obtain results of PMD changing with time.