A fiber optical circulator in which is a light beam is fed from a fiber of
a first port in a dual core glass capillary, then collimated before being
passed to a birefringent crystal wherein the light beam is divided into
two orthogonal components o and e with a displacement. The State of
Polarization (SOP) of components then are changed into the same,
perpendicular to the incident plane of the birefringent crystal prism by
the group of Faraday Rotator and two Half-Wave Plates (HWP) that have
different optical axis orientation and cover o and e components
respectively. Then the light components with the same SOP pass into a
birefringent prism where they receive angle correction to meet receiving
requirement in incident angle for the fiber of port 2 without displacement
due to their SOP. This is followed by a second group of HWP and Faraday
Rotator that changes the SOP of two components back to orthogonal. The
light beam of components then pass into the second birefringent crystal
which combines the o and e components together and pass through collimator
lens, and are received by optical fiber of the second port. The optical
path from the second port to the third port is similar to that described
above. However, due to the non-reciprocal property of the Faraday Rotator,
the SOP of the two light components from the second port will be in the
incident plane of the crystal prism, therefore receive a displacement
after the birefringent crystal prism. This displacement combined with
angle correction allows the light from the second port is fed into the
fiber of the third port. An alternative design uses a pair of glass prism
and a plane crystal to replace the function of crystal prism in the
preferred embodiment.