Compounds of fiber-optic solitons

Abstract

The concept of solitons is making inroads into industrial applications. In optical telecommunications, we see the beginning of the commercial utilization of temporal solitons -short pulses of light traveling down an optical fiber which are stabilized by nonlinearity. This technology is very successful, and yet the data-carrying capacity of optical fiber, even though it is enormous, is on the verge of reaching a fundamental limit. Concepts beyond individual soliton pulses might be helpful in pushing beyond, or working around, that limit. Several ways of creating soliton compounds will be discussed, among them soliton molecules which have already been experimentally demonstrated and recently discovered chains of dark solitons. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.