Analysis of short-term Polarization Stability using Allan Variance

The use of Allan variance to characterize the stability of optical signals affected by stochastic polarization fluctuations and the identification of the underlying power law noise processes is explored. Allan variance can ease the comparison in terms of polarization stability of optical systems affected by polarization fluctuations and define a near-optimum integration interval to reveal trends. Experiments with different optical sources show that white noise and random walk terms can be observed. This information can easily be used to systematically define, in real time, the denoising strategy in polarization-based sensing and for the optimization of polarization sensitive optical systems instead of the conventional approach relying on heuristics or information criteria.