Abstract

As a result of their excellent performance characteristics, dispersion-managed communications systems have become increasingly important in recent years. Consequently, a growing research effort has focused on understanding the nonlinear dynamics observed in experiment¹,² and numerical simulation³-⁷. In particular, many studies have been made of so-called dispersion managed solitons: RZ signals propagating in periodic dispersion maps. These investigations have focused on dispersion maps with a path-average dispersion in the anomalous regime where solitons are expected based on perturbative theories. Using the variational approach, we show that over a small range near the mean-zero dispersion point, there exist stable periodically fluctuating soliton like pulses for dispersion maps with a normal average dispersion. This work confirms recent observations by Nijhof et al⁸ and explains the mechanism which allows the propagation of these pulses.

© 1998 Optical Society of America