Impact of Quadrature Imbalance in Optical Coherent QPSK Receiver

In this letter, we present the impact of quadrature imbalance in an optical coherent quadrature phase-shift-keying (QPSK) receiver. Arbitrary conjugate misalignment was realized in all-fiber optical hybrid and two correction algorithms of quadrature imbalance, the ellipse correction method, and the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization method, were independently applied. Bit-error-rate curves versus optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) were measured for the 20-Gb/s optical QPSK signal. We show that OSNR penalty is reduced from ~6 to 1 dB at ~20deg conjugate misalignment with the help of correction algorithms.