Abstract

Optical solitons are a promising vehicle for carrying high bit rate data streams (several tens of Gbit/sec) over trans-oceanic distances (on the order of 10000 km), since they can propagate in optical fibers without spreading, as long as they get a periodic amplification boost (every 30 to 100 km) to compensate for the energy losses of the fiber. The main limitation to the error-free transmission of data carried by a train of solitons comes from the excess noise that is added to the signal inline, at each stage of amplification. As the soliton is a nonlinear system, this quantum noise produces a random walk of the soliton carrier frequency, which, in turn, gets translated into fluctuations in the soliton velocity, because of the group velocity dispersion of the fiber. At the detector, the net result of this noise is a jitter of the soliton in the grid of pre-assigned bit time-windows known as the Gordon- Haus effect.¹

© 1994 IEEE