Abstract

In the literature it has been suggested that solitons are not stable quantum mechanically, that they disintegrate under the influence of quantum noise.¹ This has been proven incorrect by exact analysis of a Hanbury Brown-Twiss (thought) experiment² with solitons that have traveled an arbitrary distance along a fiber. The correlation functions depend only on the relative delay in the measurement instrument and are independent of the distance of travel. This finding was necessary for establishing the legitimacy of the linearization approximation of the soliton, which treats the problem as a superposition of a classical soliton space-time function with added operator-noise amplitudes. This is not sufficient.

© 1993 Optical Society of America