US Patent 7747169 Adaptive polarization tracking and equalization in coherent optical receivers

A method for operating an optical receiver includes at each of a sequence of sampling times, producing a first 2D complex digital signal vector whose first component is indicative of a phase and amplitude of one polarization component of a modulated optical carrier and whose second component is indicative of a phase and amplitude of another polarization component of the carrier. For each one of the sampling times, the method includes constructing a second 2D complex digital signal vector that is a rotation of the first 2D complex digital vector for the one of sampling times. The rotation compensates a polarization rotation produced by transmission of the modulated optical carrier between an optical transmitter and the optical receiver.