Abstract

Recently, the potential of dispersion management has been recognized to reduce the residual frequency shift caused by interchannel collisions [1,2,3]. Adiabatic theoretical analysis and numerical simulations indicate that dispersion management has three important advantages in terms of residual frequency shift. First, the residual frequency shift decreases with map strength, second, there exist parameters for which the residual frequency shift is zero and third, the inclusion of loss in the system has almost no effect for strong dispersion management. In this paper, we study soliton collisions in strong dispersion managed systems which give rise to significant pulse amplitude and width variations. We demonstrate a ten-fold suppression of the residual frequency shift compared to that predicted by the adiabatic theory and derive a modified theoretical expression which is in good agreement with the numerical simulations. These results indicate that dispersion managed solitons are particularly well suited to WDM applications.

© 1998 Optical Society of America