Contents I. Introduction
The commercialization of optical transceivers with coherent detection and related emphasis on dual polarization modulation has increased the importance of an understanding of the Kerr effect as a result of vectorial field propagation. While there exists a large and laudable library of analytical studies [1]–[5], direct optical field measurements are scarce. In this paper, we report a method, apparatus and results of direct measurements of the Kerr effect on the polarization, phase and amplitude of the optical electric field. For the case of a continuous wave probe affected by a single 10 Gb/s intensity modulated pump, we compare our optical field measurements to the numerical solution of the Manakov-PMD equation [1]. Over a range of launch powers, channel spacings and relative polarization angles the measured and predicted fields agree within a signal-to-noise ratio typically exceeding 13 dB.
