Abstract

The future of optical data transmission is driven by the ever-growing demand for higher data rates. Bound states of adjacent fiber-optic solitons in dispersion managed (DM) fibers, called soliton molecules [1], may offer an improvement. Such double pulses appear in DM fibers and by necessity the pulses have to be in opposite phase. It is remarkable that in such a soliton molecule, at a certain close distance the interaction force provides a stable equilibrium. We demonstrated this recently [1], both numerically and with a full experimental characterization of amplitude and phase [2].

© 2009 IEEE