  Optical full-field recovery makes it possible to compensate for fiber
impairments such as chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion (PMD)
in the digital signal processing. For cost-sensitive short-reach optical
networks, some advanced single-polarization (SP) optical field recovery schemes
are recently proposed to avoid chromatic dispersion-induced power fading
effect, and improve the spectral efficiency for larger potential capacity.
Polarization division multiplexing (PDM) can further double both the spectral
efficiency and the system capacity of these SP carrier-assisted direct
detection (DD) schemes. However, the so-called polarization fading phenomenon
induced by random polarization rotation is a fundamental obstacle which
prevents SP carrier-assisted DD systems from polarization diversity. In this
paper, we propose a receiver of Jones-space field recovery (JSFR) to realize
polarization diversity with SP carrier-assisted DD schemes in Jones space.
Different receiver structures and simplified recovery procedures for JSFR are
explored theoretically. The proposed JSFR pushes the SP DD schemes towards PDM
without extra optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty. In addition, the
JSFR shows good tolerance to PMD since the optical field recovery is conducted
before polarization recovery. In the concept-of-proof experiment, we
demonstrate 448-Gb/s reception over 80-km single-mode fiber using the proposed
JSFR based on 22 couplers. Furthermore, we qualitatively compare the optical
field recovery in Jones space and Stokes space from the perspective of the
modulation dimension. Qualitatively, we compare the optical field recovery in
the Jones space and Stokes space from the perspective of the modulation
dimension.
