Abstract

Optical solitons, pulses with hyperbolic secant shapes and with the correct product of amplitude and width, can propagate without dispersing over long distances near the 1.5-μm loss minimum in optical fibers. It is, therefore, very tempting to think of them as potential candidates for communications purposes. On the one hand, solitons are quite stable and can be maintained by coherent amplification; thus the pulses never need to be reformed. On the other hand, the soliton’s propagation velocity depends on its mean frequency because of fiber dispersion; thus perturbations which cause frequency shifts are very important.

© 1987 Optical Society of America