Abstract

The use of active fiber lasers and amplifiers for soliton generation and transmission seems to offer a breakthrough towards the application of nonlinear optics to all-optical information processing systems. As far as picosecond solitons are concerned, erbium-doped fibers simply behave as linear amplifiers. However, it is very important to understand what is the lower bound to the time width of a soliton that can be amplified in practice. Moreover, the amplification of ultrashort pulses is subject to both Raman and coherent effects which may add novel interesting physical effects to the soliton dynamics.

© 1991 Optical Society of America