Abstract

Propagation of solitons over several thousand kilometers has been reported in recirculating fiber loop experiments [1,2]. However, a major obstacle for commercial use of soliton transmission systems has been the lack of a stable and reliable soliton source. Laboratory experiments have used either actively mode-locked external cavity lasers or gain-switched DFB lasers followed by pulse compression and optical filtering to produce soliton pulses. Neither of these sources are likely to be viable for commercial use. In this paper, we demonstrate transmission over distances up to 15000 km of solitons generated by a 5.5-mm long monolithic extended-cavity laser. Actively mode-locked, the laser provides a train of transform-limited pulses at a repetition rate of 8.2 GHz. The 106 km long recirculating fiber loop uses three low-noise Er⁺³-doped fiber amplifiers pumped by laser diodes at a wavelength of 980 nm.

© 1992 Optical Society of America