Abstract

Possibly the most appealing property of optical solitons is their particlelike behavior. Solitons tend to survive perturbations and collisions and interact nondestructively with each other. Indeed for optical solitons which obey the integrable nonlinear Schrödinger equation the interaction can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the relative phase of the two solitons.¹ In both cases the dynamics is well understood; either a periodic evolution (in the attractive case) or for the repulsive case a two soliton solution which is well approximated by the sum of two separated one soliton solutions. Bragg solitons,² on the other hand, are described by nonintegrable equations.^2-4 This means that, while they are also robust, in that they posses a particlelike behavior, they show the distinct signature of nonintegrability in that collisions are typically inelastic.⁴ In this paper we report on experimental studies of interactions of Bragg solitons in optical fibers.

© 1998 Optical Society of America