Polarization Mode Dispersion

the model for low-PMD ?bers; Nicolas Gisin covered the increasingly important topic of the interaction of PMD with polarization dependent loss. Other topics that were included in the school were: “PMD models,” which was covered byAntonio Mecozzi and Mark Shtaif; “Interaction of PMD with nonlinearity and chromatic dispersion,” which was covered by Curtis Menyuk; “PMD measurement techniques,” which was covered by Paul Williams and by Marco Schiano in two separate lectures; “Spatially resolved measurement of ?ber polarization properties,” which was covered by Luca PalmieriandAndreaGaltarossa;“PMDimpactonopticalsystems,”whichwascovered by Magnus Karlsson and by Francesco Matera in two separate lectures; “Polarization effects in recirculating loops,” which was covered by Brian Marks, Gary Carter, and Yu Sun; “PMD Emulation,” which was covered byAlan Willner and Michelle Hauer; and, ?nally, “Applications of importance sampling to PMD,” which was covered by Gino Biondini, Bill Kath, and Sarah Fogal. Dipak Chowdhury worked withArtis and VPI—two producers at that time of commercial software for modeling optical ?ber communications systems—to present a lecture that covered numerical modeling of PMD. Additionally, we had lectures on special topics by Hermann Haus, Jim Gordon, Herwig Kogelnik, and Carlo Someda. Finally, we had a poster session, which gave the lecturers the opportunity to learn something from our participants. The feedback that we received from the participants and the lecturers was ov- whelmingly positive. This success was due to the great time and energy that all the instructors put into their lectures.