Abstract

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in the propagation of nonlinear pulses, called solitons, in low-loss single-mode silica fiber. The development of the soliton laser by Mollenauer and Stolen¹ arid the work on generation and amplification of solitons by Hasegawa^2,3 demonstrated the feasibility of an optical communication system using the soliton as an information carrier. The prospect of an information transmission rate of hundreds of gigabits per second is very attractive in the area of communication and other applications. Basically, solitons are the results of the balance between the broadening due to dispersion and the self-phase modulation due to the intrinsic nonlinearity of the fiber, the optical Kerr effect.

© 1987 Optical Society of America