Abstract

A Soliton transmission system is a promising candidate as a future ultra-long distance and large capacity optical fiber transmission system. Major limiting factor of soliton systems is the timing jitter due to Gordon-Haus effect[1]-[3]. Although the soliton control techniques to reduce the timing jitter both in frequency domain[4]-[8] and time domain[9] have been intensively studied, it is important to demonstrate experimentally the Gordon-Haus limit for the most basic soliton transmission system[10],[11], which has not clearly been shown yet because the maximum transmission length is sometimes affected by other experimental factors such as the initial chirp of the pulse source[6] and/or insufficient pulse separation[7]. Previously, we have proposed a simple technique to generate a nearly transform-limited optical short pulse with variable repetition rate and variable pulse width by using a sinusoidally driven InGaAsP electroabsorption (EA) modulator[12]. In this paper, we investigate and demonstrate an experimental maximum transmission length at 5Gbit/s for the most simple soliton transmission system by using optical short pulses generated by the EA modulator.

© 1993 Optical Society of America