Abstract

The interest in nonlinear propagation of optical pulses in dielectric waveguides has been growing very rapidly in recent years. Impressive progress has been achieved in the field, as shown by the practical realisation of optically amplified fibre optic transmission systems using solitons at ultra-high bit rate over very long distances. Such results have been favoured by the development of numerical codes simulating the non linear dynamics of solitons and their interplay with optical amplifiers. At present, the most widely used numerical method to study non linear propagation is the split-step Beam Propagation Method (BPM) based on the FFT algorithm. The present work shows that finite difference methods can be very efficient and become competitive. In particular, codes based on the Crank- Nicolson (CN) implicit discretisation scheme are presented for the solution of the Non Linear Schrodinger Equation (NLSE), which governs the propagation when third order dispersion effects and Raman scattering are negligible [1]. The algorithm has good stability, works faster than BPM-FFT and allows Transparent Boundary Conditions (TBCs) [2] to be implemented.

© 1994 Optical Society of America