Demonstration of the formalistic equivalence of the JME and Poincare sphere techniques for polarization mode dispersion measurement: is there really only one polarimetric PMD measurement method?

We have shown the formalistic equivalence between the Jones matrix eigenanalysis (JME) and Poincare sphere methods (which we propose should more logically be renamed as dispersion vector analysis (DVA)), both in the form of their associated equations of motion, but also in their robustness to the finite wavelength steps which are inevitably used in realistic measurements. In particular, for the case of finite wavelength steps, we demonstrate that, when using identical test procedures (the same initial states of polarization (SOPs) and the same polarimetric analysis of the output SOP, as a function of wavelength), the two methods yield identical results. Thus, the JME and DVA methods can be considered as differing only in the details of how the data is treated, but not in their test procedure nor in their susceptibility to error.