Abstract
In ultra-long transmission systems, the combined effects of fibre-dispersion and optical Kerr effect, can be used to transmit soliton pulses well beyond the dispersion limit [1]. To overcome fiber loss in an all-optical soliton link, both lumped and distributed amplification have been used. Excursions in the signal power reduce the stability of the soliton. To sustain stable soliton propagation in a system with lumped amplifiers, the spacing between the amplifiers, Za, has to be much shorter than the soliton period, Z0, i.e. Za/Z0 << 1 [2]. Z0 is inversely proportional to the square of the bit rate and thus to satisfy the stability criterion at high bit rates, relatively small amplifier spacing will be required. When using distributed amplification, the signal power still varies with the periodicity of the pump separation. Nevertheless, the excursions will be smaller than for lumped amplifiers and numerical modelling [3] predicts that the above mentioned criterion is relaxed by as much as an order of magnitude, i.e. Za/Z0 < 1, where now Za represents the pump separation. The exact stability criterion will be a function of the magnitude of the signal power excursions along the link. In addition to this, it has been predicted that stable soliton propagation can also be achieved when Za/Z0 >> 1 [3], when using distributed amplification. Distributed amplification may be realized through the use of the Raman effect [4] or distributed erbium-doped fibres (d-EDF's) [5]. Here we present an experimental characterization of the transmission of solitons over 90 km using d-EDF's. We characterize the performance of the d-EDF according to the relation Za/Z0 and the magnitude of the signal excursion along the d-EDF, and verify experimentally that stable soliton transmission also is achievable when Za/Z0 > 1.
© 1995 Optical Society of America
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