Statistics of polarization-mode dispersion emulators with unequal sections

We study two models for the generation of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) with unequal, fixed-length sections: an isotropic model, in which the orientations of all the sectional PMD vectors are taken to be randomly and uniformly varying across the Poincaré sphere, and a rotator model, in which all sections are taken to be linearly birefringent waveplates randomly rotatable with respect to one another. We describe the implementation of importance sampling for first- and second-order PMD in both models, including a targeting method for first-order PMD. We then use analytical and numerical methods to reconstruct the statistics of first- and second-order PMD for the two models. Our results show that the statistical properties of PMD depend significantly on the specific details of how PMD is generated.