Abstract

High-speed high-contrast all-optical and gates are essential in high-speed switching networks where ultrafast thresholding and time- division demultiplexing functions are required.¹ Soliton interactions in birefringent fibers can provide highly efficient optical switching and digital logic operations. Soliton trapping is one such interaction. Here, orthogonally polarized solitons propagating along a linearly birefringent fiber can interact through cross-phase modulation. This leads to symmetric shifts of their central frequencies and, therefore, of their group velocities, thus compensating for the walk-off from the linear birefringence.² In this way, these solitons end up traveling with identical group velocities, trapping one another.

© 1992 Optical Society of America