Extreme Outages due to Polarization Mode Dispersion

We investigate the dependence of the bit-error-rate (BER) caused by amplifier noise in a linear optical fiber telecommunication system on the fiber birefringence. We show that the probability distribution function (PDF) of BER obtained by averaging over many realizations of birefringent disorder has an extended tail corresponding to anomalously large values of BER. We specifically discuss the dependence of the tail on such details of the pulse detection at the fiber output as "setting the clock" and filtering procedures.