Abstract

In recent years, narrow pulses of light called solitons have allowed for very high bit-rate transmission in optical fibre systems [1,2]. The basic idea is that the (small) nonlinearity of the glass (viz. a small increase in refractive index with intensity of light) is used to cancel the dispersion suffered by a pulse, thus forming an unchanging soliton which can propagate a great distance [3]. Short pulses can be generated in a passively mode-locked fiber lasers. These devices can be described to a high accuracy using cubic-quintic Ginzburg-Landau equation [4-6].

© 1998 Optical Society of America