Abstract

An optical fiber is a dispersive nonlinear waveguide. Short pulses in single-mode fibers broaden temporally due to the dispersion in the group velocity, and broaden spectrally due to the inensity-dependence of the index of refraction of fused silica which leads to self-phase modulation. Classical optical solitons avoid this distortion because the phase shifts due to these two effects are made to balance each other. This balance is achieved by the proper choice of pulse shape and duration for a given pulse energy. The resulting soliton pulses propagate long distances, limited only by fiber losses and are Fourier-transform-limited pulses characterized by a single nonlinear phase shift and well-defined central frequency and pulse position in time. They often can be thought of as interacting with each other in a particle-like way, and these properties give soliton pulses in fibers or in other waveguides great potential for applications in communications and optical logic.

© 1992 Optical Society of America