Abstract

Using an erbium-doped fiber amplifier loss compensated fiber loop, we have investigated the effects of soliton collisions on multiwavelength soliton data transmission. Asymmetric collisions centered at the input of the fiber or taking place over distances short compared to the amplifier spacing,¹ produces permanent soliton frequency shifts that severely degrade soliton based communication systems. In extreme cases, the soliton fuses together and never separates. Symmetric collisions, that take place over distances significantly longer than the amplification period are found to produce only temporary frequency shifts of the solitons. The measured frequency shifts are inversely proportional to the wavelength separation, which agrees well with previous theoretical calculations.² For a channel separation of more than 7 Å, soliton collisions had no measurable effect on the bit error rate and two 2-GBit/s (01010…) soliton pulse trains were propagated >9.000 km <10^-9 bit error rate.

© 1991 Optical Society of America