Abstract

Dark solitons¹ are characterized by an intensity dip on a continuous background that propagates unaltered. Although a true continuous background wave may be impractical, it has been shown that dark pulses on a background pulse of finite width can propagate adiabatically as solitons.² Dark solitons have been observed in optical fibers by a few different experimental techniques,^3-5 but the generation of the dark pulses required considerable experimental effort. In a recent experiment it was demonstrated that the nonlinear copropagation of two delayed visible pulses in an optical fiber leads to rapid intensity modulation as the pulses overlap.⁶ In this paper it is numerically demonstrated that this intensity modulation evolves into a train of fundamental dark solitons.

© 1991 Optical Society of America