Abstract

Recently, interest has been shown in understanding the behaviour of dark solitons in optical fibres [1], and assessing their usefulness for optical communications. The motivation is twofold; firstly in order to upgrade installed fibres operating in the normal dispersion regime, and secondly to take advantage of the apparently superior immunity of dark solitons to certain perturbations such as amplifier spontaneous emission noise [2]. However, a final assessment of the usefulness of dark solitons cannot be made until it is known what methods, if any, are available to control effects such as timing jitter and pulse to pulse interactions.

© 1995 Optical Society of America