Abstract

We have demonstrated picosecond-to-femtosecond soliton pulse transmission by using a distributed erbium-doped fiber amplifier (DEDFA)^1,2 There are two main difficulties in propagating such a short soliton pulse over long distances. One is the short soliton period, and the other is the effect of the soliton self frequency shift (ssfs). A 1-ps pulse width and a 0.15-ps km⁻¹ nm⁻¹ dispersion give a soliton period (Zsp) of 2.6 km. An amplifier spacing of only 10 km is much longer than Zsp, which means that nonsoliton components prevent long-distance soliton transmission.

© 1994 Optical Society of America