Abstract

The advent of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and their application to lightwave communication systems magnifies the problems of optical nonlinearities in the transmission fibers. The nonlinearities can be separated into two broad classes. Stimulated scattering, such as Brillouin and Raman, give rise to wavelength conversion of signals. In addition, the nonlinear refractive index of silica is the source of such effects as self-phase and cross-phase modulation which produce spectral broadening, and four-photon mixing which mixes signals in wavelength multiplexed systems. This talk will describe the various optical nonlinearities and discuss the limits imposed by these nonlinearities on the information capacity of lightwave communication systems. Methods for reducing the systems impact of nonlinearities will also be presented.

© 1994 Optical Society of America