Abstract

(Invited) Recently, progress in optical soliton communication has been very rapid, and it shows a great potential for opening a new field in high-speed communication. The optical soliton, which was first proposed by Hasegawa and Tappert in 1973,¹ propagates stably over long distances in an optical fiber without waveform distortion by balancing the group-velocity dispersion of the fiber with its nonlinearity, the so-called self-phase modulation. One of the main factors that limits communication speed is the group-velocity dispersion in the transmission fiber. However, optical solitons make it possible to construct a dispersion-free high-speed optical communication system by using the nonlinearity in the fiber.

© 1991 Optical Society of America