Abstract

Optical soliton pulses in fibers maintain their envelope undistorted upon propagation as a result of the balance between the effects of fiber nonlinearity and group velocity dispersion.¹ This mechanism is well described by the conservative non-linear Schrodinger equation. In fiber-based transmission systems and lasers, periodic linear loss and gain may be adjusted to cancel each other and do not significantly influence the stability of solitons.² On the other hand, in many physical systems solitary waves may result from a balance between linear and non-linear gain and loss. The paradigm equation that often applies to describe such dissipative systems is the Ginzburg-Landau equation.

© 1994 IEEE