Photonics & the Future of Fibre

© Mercury Communications Ltd - March 1993

Issue #3 of Technology Watch looked at basic fibre technologies. This issue examines
three technologies that, in combination, are capable of transporting and
switching digital data over intercontinental distances at rates in excess of 10Gbit/s:
optical amplifiers, solitons, and soliton switching. The bulk of the research &
development on these advanced fibre technologies has been undertaken by manufacturers
heavily involved in submarine cables, who need to significantly increase
data rates, decrease costs and reduce the number of repeaters needed. Laying and
maintaining submarine cables is expensive, and any reduction in capital and
operational expenses makes them more attractive than other global data transmission
media.

Advanced fibre technologies could reduce long-haul transmission costs by factors of

between ten and one hundred so their potential impact on the
telecommunications industry should not be underestimated!

Today's Submarine Cables

The last analogue submarine cable systems were deployed in the mid 1980s and low-loss
digital optical fibre cable has come to dominate transoceanic transmission
over the last decade. On the highly used transatlantic route, which tends to lead
technological developments, system capacities have moved quickly from the
280Mbit/s of TAT-8 (1988) through 420Mbit/s of C&W's PTAT-1 (1989), to the
regenerative 560Mbit/s of TAT-9 deployed in 1991.

All current transoceanic systems use amplifiers called repeaters to overcome fibre
attenuation and signal distortion (dispersion). These are placed at regular
distances throughout the cable span. Early systems operated at wavelenghts of 1300nm
with repeater spacings of 50km. With the advent of 1500 nm technology
repeater spans have increased to more than 100km.

Regenerative repeaters are complex opto-electronic devices. They convert (demodulate)

the optical signal traffic to electronic signals, filter and amplify them, and
convert back to optical signals before relaunching them on the next span of cable.
Repeaters need to be designed for a specific data-rate, so upgrading them to
higher data-rates at a later date is well nigh impossible.
Figure 3 - Submarine Cable Application Segments

Consequently, a great deal of effort has gone into finding a way of amplifying signals at
the optical level wihout converting signals back to electrical signals.

Optical Amplifiers

It is not widely known beyond submarine transmission specialists that optical amplifiers
are already a reality. Companies like STC Submarine Systems in the UK,
AT&T in the USA, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDD) in Japan are now moving out of
the system trial phase and moving rapidly towards full scale production.

Optical amplifiers are devices that can be used instead of repeaters in long-haul fibre
links. They operate entirely in the optical domain and do not employ any
translation of data back to electrical baseband signals. Although there are optical
amplifiers based on semiconductor lasers, the principal technolgy used on long-haul
links is optical fibre doped with the rare-earth element Erbium, Er (doping is the
introduction of minute amounts of an element). These Er-doped fibre amplifiers
(EDFAs) offer gains of up to 30dB (1000 times) and are essentially transparent to the bit-
rate of the data transmitted.

Figure 4 shows the basic arrangement of an EDFA. A high-powered 'pump laser'

operating at a wavelength of 1480 nm is mixed with the 1550 nm optical traffic
signal and the combined signal is fed into the special amplifying Er-doped fibre. The
isolator allows the amplified 1550 nm signal to leave the amplifier but prevents
the 1480 nm pump signal from leaving, in effect forcing it to recirculate around the
Erbium-doped fibre. Often, the amplifier will also contain a bandpass filter to
prevent the build-up of noise which would degrade the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the
system.

Figure 4 - An Erbium Doped Optical amplifier

The supervisory circuitry continually monitors the performance of the amplifier and can
detect malfunctions or broken cables. When mounted in an undersea cable,
each amplifier's supervisory circuit can be remotely accessed to check performance.
Usual configurations contain duplicated amplifiers and run the pump-laser at
around half-power to lengthen laser life.

The Physics of Optical Amps

The result of optical amplification is simple to describe: the high optical energy of the
1480 nm pump laser is converted by the Er-doped fibre into optical energy at
the traffic wavelength of 1550 nm. The result of this is that the output power of the
optical-traffic signal is much higher than the input-traffic signal. How it achieves
this is less easily understood!

The pump laser source is mixed with the signal traffic using an optical coupler. The
combined signals are fed into the Er-doped fibre where the photons from the
1480 nm pump laser signal are absorbed by the rare-earth element Erbium incorporated
in the fibre in minute quantities.

The Erbium ions are raised to a higher level of energy as a result (Figure 5). However,
the ions that reach this higher level rapidly decay to a lower metastable state
(metastable means unstable). The energy difference between the higher level and the
metastable level is exactly equal to the wavelength of the 1550 nm signal (that is
why Erbium is used). The arrival of a 1550 nm signal photon triggers the release of an
Erbium ion temporarily held in the metastable state which then drops down the
zero-energy, or ground state where it originated. In doing so, the ion releases energy in
the form of a photon at the same wavelength and phase as the 1550 nm signal
frequency photon. This mechanism provides the amplification function.

Benefits of Optical Amplification

Optical amplifiers are seen by many as a panacea for many transmission ills, in that they
supposedly allow operators to increase bit-rates as and when dictated by
traffic requirements. Current technology does not live up to that ideal, unfortunately. For
example, a 2.5Gbit/s link requires optical amplifiers to be spaced at 60 -
80km. If it was decided at a later date to upgrade this to 5Gbit/s then amplifiers will need
to be spaced at a nominal 40 - 50km. Furthermore, bandwidths are
currently limited to around 30nm per amplifier, which reduces considerably as more
amplifiers are placed in series. Therefore, a 3000km submarine cable might only
achieve a bandwidth of only 3nm allowing only one light carrier to be used. Of course,
over time, these limitations will be overcome. Even with this limitation optical
amplifiers provide the following major advantages over conventional repeaters.

Figure 5 - Decay of Ions in a pumped-Er Fibre

significant equipment cost reductions

improved ability to upgrade

improved reliability brought about by the simplification of repeaters; and

higher bit-rates achievable

Using a power optical amplifier at the transmit end and a pre-amplifier at the receive end
of a fibre system, it is now possible to achieve repeaterless transmission
distances of 300km at data-rates of 2.4Gbit/s.

Solitons

Solitons are rather avant garde in the sense that little has been written about them outside
of the scientific community. However, the very future of fibre data
transmission could lay in their hands. So, what are solitons? As we have seen above and
in TW #3, even though data rates are often said to be infinite in monomode
fibre, achievable rates are still limited to several Gbit/s and even then amplifiers are
needed to achieve spans in excess of 100km. Solitons are the ultimate gee whiz
technology, but promise to deliver data rates greater than 10Gbit/s with far fewer optical
amplifiers.

Figure 7 - Pulse Widening Caused by Dispersion

It seems that John Scott Russell, a Scottish ship builder and engineer in the late 19th
century provided the first description of what later became known as the soliton.
He was riding his horse one day along the banks of the Union canal in Scotland when he
observed that a 'solitary' wave created by a barge travelled for many miles
without deterioration. He spent much of his remaining life trying to understand and
explain this phenomenon. A soliton is a wave that does not broaden or lose its
shape when travelling in a medium. In communications, a soliton is a light pulse of
special shape propagating in monomode fibre.

In 1972 two Soviet physicists, Zacharov and Shabat, established the possibility of optical
solitons when they showed that a particular non-linear differential equation
(Schrödinger equation, if you can remember this from your university days!) produced a
wave that did not dissipate and could recover its previous shape when
subjected to external interference. An optical soliton is created in a fibre due to the
interaction between two opposing factors. The first factor is that above 1300nm
shorter wavelengths travel faster. As an optical pulse travels down a fibre, the longer
wavelength components of the light pulse tend to fall behind. Thus the length of
the pulse is increased by extending the trailing edge, so that the frequency at the leading
edge is higher than at the trailing edge. This is called optical dispersion, as
discussed in TW #3, and causes conventional optical pulses to broaden in proportion to
the distance travelled, as shown in figure 7. The effect of this is to limit the
data rates that can be achieved on monomode fibres.

The second factor is caused by amplitude non- linearity of the fibre. This results in
increasing refractive index of the fibre with increasing pulse intensity. The practical
result of this is that the phase or frequency of the pulse changes with intensity. The
change is small but brings about major effects.

The soliton pulse is a bell shaped pulse as shown in figure 8 and has a particular shape.
Each part of the pulse on the amplitude axis will undergo a frequency shift in
the opposite sense to those caused by the dispersion in the horizontal axis. Therefore,
solitons form when there is a balance between these two opposing factors,
group-velocity dispersion and non-linearity.
Figure 8 - The Soliton Optical Pulse

Solitons have 'magic' properties, in that they will propagate without deterioration over
many thousands of kilometres and as a single soliton is only 1 picosecond long
(1 million millionth of a second) long they should permit realisable data rates in excess of
10Gbit/s.

Solitons are not a perpetual motion machine and are in reality subject to several
limitations. However, it has been shown recently that solitons that have decayed can
be revitalised, restored and relaunched following a stage of amplification. The real issue
with solitons is not so much how far they will travel, as this is pretty much
understood, but how closely can they be packed. The limitation to this seems to be the
noise generated by the regeneration amplifiers. What occurs is that a
generated noise photon has the effect of shifting the frequency of the entire soliton,
effectively destroying the balanced nature of the pulse. Also, it seems that solitons
can pass through each other and recover, but in a data communications role this would
obviously lead to data corruption and is unacceptable. The best source of
solitons is Er-doped fibre, the same as used in optical amplifiers.

The next generation of intercontinental systems such as TAT-12 across the Atlantic, will
use optical amplifiers and make do with the limitations of conventional
technology. By the end of the century, however, it is likely that long distance
communication will dominated by solitons.

Figure 9 - A soliton based NOR switch (Source: Byte Magazine)

Soliton Examples

Solitons are far from being just an interesting laboratory phenomena, as the following
examples will show.

NTT
Nippon Denshin Denwa (NTT) has used solitons to transmit data at speeds of 20Gbit/s
(yes, twenty!) over a distance of 1000km, which they believe to be a world
record. Their experiments, undertaken in 1991, demonstrated transmission at 10Gbit/s
over a 1500km optical fibre loop. NTT used erbium-doped fibre amplifiers
and believe that narrower solitons could be used to increase data rates beyond 1 terra bits
(one million million million) per second. NTT expect to deploy this
technology in 1994/5 time period.

AT&T and Bell

AT&T and Bell scientists have demonstrated error-free transmission of data using
solitons at 5Gbit/s over 15,000 km.

Soliton Switches

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about the commercial possibility
of optical logic. This, like the two previous subjects discussed, falls under the
heading of photonics.

Figure 10 - Optical Signals in a Soliton Based NOR Gate (Source: Byte magazine)

As with optical regeneration, the need to convert optical data back to baseband electrical
signals is tremendously cumbersome and slow. New techniques hold out
the hope that it will soon be possible to execute logic at the optical level in the form of
switches or binary logic such as NOR and NAND gates. Although this
technology still lies in the realm of the laboratory, a most interesting application of
solitons can be seen in the SOLITON NOR GATE. It doesn't take too much
imagination to see what could be achieved if this approach to optical logic can be
commercialised by the end of the decade.
So, how does this optical logic work? Again, it is based on erbium-doped fibre. Not only
does this fibre enable the laser generation of high-power solitons, and
amplify optical low-power optical data streams, but it can act as a logic gate as well! It is
hard to believe that all this can be achieved from a piece of passive glass!
Erbium fibre is an attractive medium in which to make all-optical logic gates, because
such gates have an almost instantaneous response. By using long lengths of
inexpensive fibre, low switching energies can be achieved. The technology is called
soliton-dragging logic gates and can satisfy all the needs for logic gates or
switches in an optical computer or digital communications data switch. It is possible to
cascade gates, connect the output of one gate to many inputs of others and
vice versa. It is also possible to perform the complete range of Boolean logic operations
including addition and subtraction.

In soliton-dragging logic, the speed or propagation time of the control pulse depends on
whether it propagates alone through a gate, or whether it is accompanied by
another signal. Physically, when two pulses are coincident they 'chirp' and interact with
each other by changing each other's centre frequency This causes a change in
the velocity of the soliton because of the frequency dispersion explained earlier.
Therefore, by looking for the output signal at a specific time it possible to differentiate
between there being two inputs present or only one i.e. a logic NOR function.

The unusual schematic of a soliton-dragging NOR gate is shown in figure 10. The gate is
made from two lengths of fibre, the first being typically 75 metres long and
the second 350m (this is not exactly a miniature logic gate!). For the more technically
minded, the control soliton is propagated in a vertical axis while the signal
soliton is propagated in the horizontal axis. Hence, a polariser is required to separate the
control signal from data signals. The gate is based on a synchronous clock,
as seen with SDH, and is based on time-shift keying. That is, if the control soliton arrives
within a specified time window the output corresponds to a binary '1'. If the
control soliton in absent in the window the output is a binary '0'. In other words, the NOR
function. This function is shown graphically in figure 9 above.

A soliton-dragging NOR gate is capable of operating at speeds of 200Gbit/s. This is

around 1000 times faster than today's fastest silicon based logic!

Although quite physically bulky, this approach to super-fast optical switching is currently
realisable and could be seen in commercial tele-communications switches
before the end of the decade.

Photonics in General

Under the umbrella of photonics, come many other interesting subjects such as optical
memories, optical backplanes in computers and telecommunications
equipment, holographic applications, 3D storage on CD-ROM and many more. These
will be looked at in more detail in future issues of Technology Watch.
Optical amplifiers, solitons, and optical switches are leaving the research and
development environment and by the end of the decade data transmission and switching
could be transformed. I say 'could' because like many other technologies
commercialisation and cost reduction may pose insurmountable problems to exploitation.
I
would imagine though, that we all ought to start taking lessons in optics as silicon based
transmission and switching eqipment could become a thing of the past all too
fast!

6. Conclusion

back to content

Soliton transmission, because of its scientific and practical inportance, has received more
and more attention. It has already created a new field in optical
communicatin. In the Electronic Letters journal alone, in 1995, there were more than 20
papers on soliton-based communication system experiments. A few of them,
mostly, the NTT Optical Soliton Communication Research Group in Japan, has been
testing the soliton transmission on their existing commercial optical fiber
systems.

Although soliton-based transmission is not commercially available today, we see that it is

already matured to its practical application age. One of the reason that it is
not actually implemented is the technology moves so fast, the conventional optical
systems are still in their active stage, people will be reluctant to fund in the soliton
systems. This somewhat prohibit the soliton systems from commercialization. The
earliest soliton systems being put into use will probably be the transoceanic
long-haul fiber cables, where the ultralong distance as well as the optical repeater are the
main concern. Anyway, we could see a steady research and implementation
progress in the soliton transmission systems.

Another interesting area, dark soliton, transmission, is quite important in the research
field. Dark solitons are less influenced by noise and their interactions are
weaker than those of bright solitons. Although relatively less manpower is put into their
research at present, it may be a hot spot within a few years.

7. References

back to content

In the following, OFCC means Optical Fiber Communications Conference:

 1. Masatoshi Suzuki, "Long-haul soliton transmission beyond 10 Gbits/s", FB3, p303,
1995 OFCC.

2. B. Christensen, G. Jacobsen, E. Bødtker, I. Mito, "Simple, bit-rate-flexible soliton

generator and penalty-free 9-Gbit/s data transmission over 416
km of DSF", FB4, p304, 1995 OFCC.

3. 1994 OFCC.

4. Masataka Nakazawa, "Ultrahigh-speed optical soliton communication and aspects

of soliton-transmission technology", WC1, p87, 1993 OFCC.

5. Optical Amplifiers and Their Applications, Vol. 13, 1990 OSA Technical Digest
Series (Optical Society of America, Washington DC, 1990).

6. C.R. Giles, P.B. Hansen, S.G. Evangelides et al., "Soliton transmission over
4200km by using a mode-locked monolithic extended-cavity laser as a
soliton source", WC2, p88, 1993 OFCC.

7. F. Matera, M. Romagnoli and B. Daino, "Alternate polarisation soliton transmission

in standard dispersion fiber links with no in-line controls",
Electron.Lett. 1995, Vol.31, pp1172.

8. S. Kawai, K. Iwatsuki and S. Nishi, "Demonstration of error free optical soliton

transmission over 30,000km at 10 Gbit/s with signal frequency
sliding technique", Electron.Lett. 1995, Vol.31, pp1463.

9. M. Nakazawa, Y. Kimura et. al., "Soliton transmission at 20Gbit/s over 2,000km in

Tokyo metropolitan optical network", Electron.Lett. 1995,
Vol.31, pp1478.

10. F. Favre, D. LeGuen and M.L. Moulinard, "Robustness of 20 Gbit/s 63km span
6Mm sliding-filter controlled soliton transmission", Electron.Lett.
1995, Vol.31, pp1600.

11. A. Naka, T. Matsuda, S. Saito and K. Sato, "5,200km straight-line soliton

transmission experiment at 10Gbit/s", Electron.Lett. 1995, Vol.31,
pp1679.

FIBER AND NONLINEAR OPTICS

I. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF NARROW-GAP III-V SEMICONDUCTORS

A detailed theoretical study of the refractive indices of Sb-based III-V semiconductor
compounds was carried out. The calculation was based on a numerical
Kramers-Kronig analysis of the carrier-related imaginary part of the dielectric function
e2. All absorption mechanisms that contribute to e2 were accounted for -
absorption by direct and indirect interband transitions near the fundamental absorption
edge, free-carrier absorption, intervalence-band and interconduction-band
absorption, phonon absorption and interband absorption at higher energies. The validity
of the expressions used for the different contributions was proved by a
comparison between the theoretical results and the experimental data available.

The near-band-gap refractive index spectra of InSb, InAs and GaSb for different free-
carrier densities were obtained. The density dependence of the refractive
index was analyzed and a comparison with the results from the Drude theory was
performed. The linear dependence, as predicted by the Drude theory, was
observed only beyond a certain free-carrier density. Moreover, the Drude theory was
found to underestimate the carrier-induced changes in the refractive index. The
refractive indices of In1-xGaxSb and InAsxSb1-x ternary alloys were also investigated. It
was found that the influence of the free carriers on the refractive index
increases with a decrease of the band gap. Nevertheless, for both systems, the larger
band-gap material had a smaller value of the refractive index in the
transparency region. The results obtained are expected to be very useful in the design
optimization of phase modulators and laser diodes operating in the midinfrared
(2-5 mm) region.

II. NONLINEAR PROPAGATION AND INTERACTION OF OPTICAL SOLITONS.

Two special types of the parameter-free Ginzburg-Landau equation were considered in

detail. The first combines the bandwidth-limited linear gain and nonlinear
dispersion; and the second, the broadband gain, the linear dispersion and the nonlinear
losses. These equations have exact solitary-pulse solutions which are subject
to a background instability. The models developed have applications in nonlinear fiber
optics and travelling-wave convection. It was established that soliton
propagation in transmission lines where strong third-order dispersion is present can be
reasonably described in terms of the second-order perturbation theory. A
modulation of the soliton phase caused by third-order dispersion was taken into account
in this approach. A techique was proposed for the description of N-soliton
interaction that generalizes Karpman-Solov’ev’s approach for the nonlinear Schrodinger
equation. Using it, we derived a nonlinear system of equations describing
the dynamics of the parameters of N-well separated solitons with nearly equal amplitudes
and velocities. We proved that the linear perturbations affect each of the
solitons separately, while the nonlinear ones lead also to additional terms of interaction
between neighboring solitons. The break-up of N-soliton band states due to
intrapulse Raman scattering and third-order dispersion was also analysed in detail.

III. FIBER-OPTIC SENSORS AND ACCESSORIES.

A displacement fiber-optic sensor was developed based on a pair of emitter and receiver
fibers and a short hollow metal optical waveguide. It allows displacement
measurements in the 0 - 10 mm range with best sensitivity of 10 V/mm. A computer-
controlled non-contact laser vibrometer with a D/A converter was also
developed. It performs vibration measurements in wide amplitude (0.003 - 5.0 mm) and
frequency (0 - 100 kHz) ranges of objects of very small mass and size.

Femtosecond Soliton Dynamics

Fiorenzo G. Omenetto, B. P. Luce1 and Antoinette J. Taylor

Materials Science and Technology Division, MST- 10, MS K764
1Theoretical Division (T-7)
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos NM 87545
omenetto@lanl.gov

Any significant progress is dictated by the ability to carefully observe the experimental
outcome of the process under investigation which becomes most challenging
at time scales that approach the fastest events in nature.

Once upon a time, in 1834 to be exact, a Scottish engineer by the name of Sir John Scott
Russell ended up chasing a strange isolated wave that was riding upstream
the Union Canal, close to Edinburgh, seemingly unperturbed[l]. His notes observed that
“...[the wave] rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of
a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which
continued its course along the channel apparently without change of
form or diminution of speed [...] Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance
interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I
have called the Wave of Translation”. Since this first documented observation, this
phenomena has been observed in many nonlinear systems and has been coined
“soliton” to describe the particlelike properties of these pulse envelopes. Specifically, in
the optical realm, Hasegawa and Tappert in 1971 [2] suggested that these
waves that propagate undistorted could exist and their first experimental observation was
performed by Mollenauer in 1980 [3].

Optical solitons have been a topic of great interest since then, especially for
telecommunication applications where a pulse of light propagating without distortion
efficiently preserves the information which the pulse itself carries.

In addition, the “particlelike” nature of these pulses makes them immune to distortion as
they collide with one another, which is another particularly attractive feature
when many of these pulses need to be stacked close to one another in a communications
line.
In an optical fiber, soliton generation comes from the interplay of group velocity
dispersion and fiber nonlinearity. To first order, as a short light pulse propagates
through the fiber, to firstorder, these two effects counterbalance each other and the
tendency of GVD to broaden the pulse is counterbalanced by the nonlinear
effects that tends to shrink the pulse in time. The resulting effect is a pulse that reaches an
“equilibrium condition” and propagates undistorted.

Currently soliton based transmission systems constitute the cutting edge of

telecommunication channels and commercial systems which can deliver bit rates in
excess
of 1 Tb/s are being marketed, while bit rates of 3 Tb/s have been reported [4]. The pulses
commonly used in these systems have duration of tens of picoseconds.
The demand for increased bandwidth is relentless and shortening of the pulses would
permit further gain in the single channel. As a consequence, it is of interest to try
to understand the limitations involved in fiber optics propagation when the pulses sent
become progressively shorter. The physics of soliton propagation, especially
on femtosecond time scales, is still elusive, and the understanding of dispersive and
nonlinear effects acting on ultrashort pulse propagation in single-mode optical
fibers is crucial to determine the path for the next generation of high capacity networks.
Theoretical tools to model optical pulse propagation in fibers, such as the
non-linear Schroedinger equation (NLSE), lack an exact solution in the femtosecond
regime, and accurate prediction of pulse evolution becomes difficult under these
conditions.

From an experimental standpoint, accurate characterization of the pulse in amplitude and

phase is crucial when tailoring the pulse shape on the femtosecond scale. A
variety of techniques that recover the intensity and phase of the pulse have been
developed in recent years [5,6], driven by the progressively decreasing duration of
pulses down to just a few optical cycles [7] . Among these techniques, Frequency
Resolved Optical Gating (FROG)[5] has proved itself as a versatile and reliable
method for ultrashort pulse analysis in the temporal and spectral domain, and has begun
recently to find applications in fiber optics propagation studies [8]. A
complete ensemble of information (knowledge of the electric field’s temporal envelope,
phase and spectral properties) in this context provides a unique set of tools
which can shed some light on the dynamics governing ultrashort pulse propagation and
nonlinear effects in fibers and can yield information on the physical processes
limiting ultrashort pulse transmission. Our application of this diagnostic technique
revealed, for the first time, an experimental observation of the phase dynamics
leading to soliton formation in single-mode optical fibers. The results obtained enabled a
thorough analysis of chirped soliton formation. In the experiment we use l =
1.55 [mm, E=3.5 nJ pulses at a ~80 MHz repetition rate, generated by an optical
parametric oscillator (OPO) as the input to the optical fibers. These pulses have a
temporal duration of t~160 fs pulse and exhibit a pronounced (linear) chirp. The pulses
are then attenuated and coupled into a 10-meter link of conventional
single-mode optical fiber (Corning SMF-28). This short fiber length is chosen in order to
be insensitive to polarization-mode dispersion effects and losses while still
being adequately long to exhibit specific characteristic features of chirped soliton
dynamics for the pulsewidths and energies employed. The energy of the output
pulses from the fiber link is monitored, and then the pulses are then sent to a single-shot
SHG-FROG apparatus. The sensitivity of this arrangement has been recently
reported to permit detection of pulses with energies <20 pJ over a temporal range well in
excess of 1 ps, and has been shown to have high dynamic range, permitting
the measurement of temporal features over four orders of magnitude. This is a very
important factor for accurate detection and reconstruction of pulses that emerge
from optical fibers which are not of extremely high energy.

Figure 1. Global sampling of FROG traces taken at

the output of a 10-m link of fiber for increasing pulse
energies. The evolution towards a short pulse is evident
in this sequence.
Figure 2. Reconstructed intensity and phase profiles of output pulses at 10 meters and
corresponding FROG traces for pulses
having input energies of a) 228 pJ, b) 255 pJ, c) 294 pJ, and d) 318 pJ. The thinner solid
line represents the phase and the
thicker solid line represents the intensity.
The pulse energies are carefully varied before the pulses are launched into the fiber,
allowing indirect control over the magnitude of the nonlinear effects. Figure 1
illustrates a sampling of different experimental data taken for increasing pulse power
values launched in the fiber. The sequence of FROG traces elucidates
graphically the temporal evolution of the pulse showing the effect of the nonlinearity
counteracting the linear dispersive contribution for higher launched energies, in
contrast with the traces detected at lower energies in which the linear contribution is
dominant. By reconstructing the traces we can obtain the temporal intensity and
phase profile of the pulses revealing the underlying mechanisms that lead to the soliton
formation process. Figure 2 depicts 4 of the traces of the sequence illustrated
in figure 1. The time and phase profiles that are obtained from the FROG reconstructions
are correspondingly illustrated. Evolution in the phase from a linear chirp
(parabolic phase profile) to the flat phase profile indicative of a soliton is apparent as the
temporal envelope of the pulse goes from nearly 1 ps to ~200 fs.
Furthermore, interesting features such as the formation of p phase slips can be observed
as the soliton is formed. As chirped solitons propagate, it is known that the
dispersive energy associated with the initial chirp gradually leaves the soliton in a series
of periodic bursts accompanied by characteristic oscillations in the peak
amplitude of the pulse. These dynamics were described in 1984 by Desem and Chu [9]
and originate from the pulse redistributing its energy within the center and the
wings of the pulse, eventually settling to the predicted soliton waveform. These
oscillations can be also verified in the experimental observation by performing a
comparison with the amplitude of the asymptotic soliton (the observed pulse can be seen
to be below at first, then reach and finally exceed the amplitude of the
asymptotic soliton). The temporal evolution and phase dynamics were verified in detail
by comparing numerical simulation with remarkable agreement [10]. A further
confirmation that the phase slips are associated with near-zeros in the amplitude and not
artifacts is given by plotting the log-linear amplitude profiles for the
perturbed soliton formation case (corresponding to an energy of 318 pJ), along with the
phase profile and the sech profile for a soliton of the same pulsewidth. This
plot is shown in fig. 3. Here, the (near)-zeros of the amplitude associated with the p-phase
jump are detectable with more clarity, and comparison with the phase
profiles reveals that they coincide precisely with the phase slips. By plotting the
experimental spectrum on a log-linear scale in comparison with that expected for a
pure soliton of the same pulsewidth and identical fiber parameters one can also observe
that the spectra are in excellent agreement over four orders of magnitude in
the intensity. The detail obtained in the reconstruction of the phase dynamics opens an
array of experimental possibilities for the observation of ultrashort pulse
propagation which can be of interest in understanding the fundamental limits of this
proposition. The ability to observe the evolution on these timescales leads into a
new realm of investigation. Application of this experimental technique should enable an
increased understanding of the physical mechanisms that govern the dynamics
of ultrashort pulses in guided propagation, pushing the frontier of optical communications
into the femtosecond regime.
Figure 3. Further comparison of intensity and spectral profiles for 318 pJ output pulse at
10 meters, showing experimental profiles
(left column) and corresponding profiles from numerical simulation (right column). a)
Log-linear plot of intensity profiles,
b) Log-linear plot of power spectra (arbitrary units). The dashed line in figs (a) and the
circles in figs (b) show the intensity
and spectral profiles of pure solitons of the same peak intensity, for comparison
References

1. John Scott Russell, “Report on Waves”, report of the XlVth meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, York, Sept. 1844 (London,
1845), pp.311-390, a great report can be found at http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/-
chris/scott_russell.html

2. A. Hasegawa and F. Tappert, Appl. Phys. Lett. 23, p. 142 (1971)

3. L. F. Mollenauer, R. H. Stolen and J. P, Gordon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, p. 1095 (1980)

4. OFC Postdeadline Papers

5. C. laconis and I. A. Walmsley, Opt. Lett, 23, 792 (1998)

6. J. W. Nicholson, J. Jasapara, W. Rudolph, F. G.Omenetto and A. J. Taylor, Optics

Letters, in press

7. R. Trebino, K. W. DeLong, D. Fittinghoff, J. Sweetster, M. A. Krumbugel and D.

Kane, Rev. Sci. Instr., 68, 3277 (1997)

8. M. D. Thompson, J. M. Dudley, L. P. Barry and J. D. Harvey, Opt. Lett, 23, 1582

(1998)

9. C. Desem and P. L. Chu, Opt. Lett, 11 (4), p. 248, (1986)

10. F. G. Omenetto, B. Luce, D. Yarotsky, and A. J. Taylor, Opt. Lett., 24, 13 92 (1999)

2
Optical pulses are supposed to arrive at the receiver within an interval of time
known as the bit slot. The receiver samples the signal in the center of each bit
slot and then determines whether the bit is a “1” or a “0” based on the amplitude
of the signal at that instant in time. The presence of a soliton in the bit slot
means that the bit is detected as a “1”; likewise, the absence of a soliton is a “0”
bit. The sequence of bits, or bit stream, arriving at the receiver must be correctly
detected in order to properly reconstruct the data sent by the transmitter at the
beginning of the system.
In an ideal situation (without timing jitter), every soliton would arrive precisely in
the center of its respective bit slot, and there would be no errors in the detection
process. An example of such an ideal bit placement is shown in Figure 1. Notice
that the peak amplitude of the soliton occurs at the center of its bit slot; hence,
the receiver has no trouble properly detecting the soliton as a “1” bit.
Time
Amplitude
Bit Slot
Detects "1"
Figure 1 A soliton without any timing jitter arrives with its
peak amplitude at the center of its bit slot.
In reality, there is always some fluctuation in the arrival times of the solitons at
the receiver; such fluctuation is known as timing jitter. Consider Figure 2 as an
example: the peak of the soliton is slightly shifted from the center of the bit slot.
The temporal difference between the peak of the soliton and the center of the bit
slot is the timing jitter for that pulse. As before, the receiver samples the signal at
the center of the bit slot; however, the amplitude it observes is much less than if
the soliton were properly centered. The difference between the peak amplitude
of the soliton and that measured by the receiver is called the amplitude jitter for
that pulse.

What is "soliton"?
The term "soliton" was introduced in the 1960's, but the scientific research of solitons had
started in the 19th century when John Scott-Russell observed a large solitary wave in a
canal near Edinburgh. In the days of Scott Russell, there was much debate concerning the
very existence of this kind of solitary waves. Nowadays, many model equations of
nonlinear phenomena are known to possess soliton solutions.

Solitons are very stable solitary waves in a solution of those equations. As the term
"soliton" suggests, these solitary waves behave like "particles". When they are located
mutually far apart, each of them is approximately a traveling wave with constant shape
and velocity. As two such solitary waves get closer, they gradually deform and finally
merge into a single wave packet; this wave packet, however, soon splits into two solitary
waves with the same shape and velocity before "collision".
The stability of solitons stems from the delicate balance of "nonlinearity" and
"dispersion" in the model equations. Nonlinearity drives a solitary wave to concentrate
further; dispersion is the effect to spread such a localized wave. If one of these two
competing effects is lost, solitons become unstable and, eventually, cease to exist. In this
respect, solitons are completely different from "linear waves" like sinusoidal waves. In
fact, sinusoidal waves are rather unstable in some model equations of soliton phenomena.
Computer simulations show that they soon break into a train of solitons.

In this exhibition, we present several model equations of soliton phenomena along with
soliton solutions. These equations are the most fundamental examples of the so called
"integrable systems". Besides soliton solutions, these model equations exhibit many
remarkable properties, which invoked a wide range of researches since the 1960's.

Introduction to the
Optical Solitons and its possible application
The soliton concept comes from the description of a certain solitary water wave observed
by J.S.Russel in 1834. From then on, this phenomenon with infinite conserved quantities
absorbed the attention of many mathematicians and physicists, and in 1895, Korteweg
and deVries found a nonlinear equation containing the soliton solution. Since the
beginning of laser physics, because of the strong field magnitude of lasers, the interaction
between laser and material must be described by the nonlinear equations, and it gives the
rise of nonlinear physics. In 1960s, American mathematician Zabusky and Kruskal made
the major contribution of the mathematical technique, namely inverse scattering method
(IST), to get the analytical solution and they named it soliton. This is very attractive
because it is not the same as the normal perturbation theory, it get a global evolution of
the wave, but not only the local behavior, and actually what is interesting here is the
global phenomena. From then on, The soliton concept was widely used in many areas and
evolved in different disciplines. Such as, due to the nonlinear effect along one direction in
condensed matter physics, it is believed that it is a proper way to explain the structural
phase transition in certain crystals. Or the interaction between laser and matter, the self-
induced-transparency, the four wave mixing. And also, it gave the birth to a kind of new
discipline, which concentrates on the nonlinear materials.

In the contemporary scientific world, the nonlinear phenomena and the chaotic behavior
of a dynamical system absorb the attention of physicists, mathematicians and engineers.
And soliton is the strange behavior of propagating waves and the analytical solution of
several kinds of nonlinear solutions, so it becomes the focus of interests.

There are three characteristic kinds of nonlinear equations involved in the soliton
solutions :

1. The Korteweg - de Vries equation

Which describes the shallow water in fluid dynamics, or the ion plasma wave, etc ;

2. The sine - Gordon equation

Which describes the motion of dislocation in crystals, the behavior of Josephson

junctions, or the self-induced transparency in optics ;

3. The nonlinear Schr dinger equation

Which describes the solitons propagating in the fiber, the evolution of BEC condensates
and the superconductivity in Ginzburg-Landau theory.
The mathematical technique for the analytical solution of solitons is inverse scattering
method, which means we can get what the initial potential looks like if only we know
what's the scattering spectrum, the energy of the bound state. In pure math, this is a very
complicated area, it is related to Riemamm-Hilbert problem and Painlev transform. But
in the soliton physics, the first thing is to use a proper equation to derive the nonlinear
equation. Especially in the soliton communication area, if we consider the material is
Centro-symmetric, so the third order terms of the polarizability will be the dominant term
to get the nonlinear effect. After we use the Fourier transformation to change the equation
into frequency domain, then we could get the NLSE.

There is also a tendency in Quantum Optics to use the second quantization skill to write
the NLSE in a complicated way in order to see the interaction of soliton pulses and fiber
field in detail. Classically, the optical solitons are described by the NonLinear Schr
dinger Equation (NLSE), it is shown that classical optical solitons have quantum analogs
in the form of superposition of mutually bound multiphoton states. And the description of
such bound multiphoton states is given by the Bethe-ansatz solution of the second-
quantized NLSE.

Here are some pictures, which depict the evolution of soliton in the time domain and the
collision of two solitons. In the soliton theory, the first order solution is the single soliton
and all the higher order solutions represent the multi-soliton state and so can describe the
collision and interaction between solitons. From the graph, we can see that the
superposition of solitons is different from the normal concept because the amplitude
where they collide is not the addition of two different amplitudes.
 The equation for single soliton is ;

From the equation, we can see that the amplitude of the wave is related to the phase speed
of the wave, a typical phenomenon in nonlinear science.

From this picture here, we can see that the spatial envelope of the soliton is hyperbolic
secant and it doesn't disperse when it propagates. And it can be shown that integration of
one pulse equals to ¥ð.

The particular solution which describes the second order soliton (two
soliton solution) is ;

There are several kinds of mechanism to generate optical solitons. The first successful
experiment was a two-cavity laser model published in 1984. In 1987, Berg and
Christiansen proposed the first theorical model for the soliton laser ; they use the
Maxwell-Bloch equation to describe the major cavity, the NonLiner Schr dinger
Equation (NLSE) to describe the fiber cavity. We know that the soliton effect is due to
the existence of group velocity dispersion and the nonlinear effect, so the major problem
in the soliton laser description is to find a proper way to utilize the nonlinear materials.
Later on, it shows that almost all the optical nonlinear effect has the sufficient capability
to generate the solitons. Such as, the optical parametric oscillator (OPO) when the OPO
operates near anti-resonance, stable dark-pulse solitons may be generated, or the four
wave mixing.

Currently, the long-distance soliton communication also stimulated the interests of

material scientists. They are competing by various methods to get the transmission fiber
easier to make and stable and inexpensive.

Generally, the spatial solitons can transmit in the optical nonlinear media having the Kerr
effect, and then the nonlinear effects of the media can exactly compensate the linear
diffraction effect. But also we can use the magneto-optical effects so that we can control
the interaction between different pulse, and photo-refractive effects, which can keep the
spatial bright soliton in the crystal. And so that this new type of soliton can be generated
even at moderate light intensities, and the solitons are independent of the absolute light
intensity.

The possible application of optical soliton is in the "repeaterless" communication of

transoceanic distances. Due to the energy loss in the fiber, conventional communication
using optical fibers detect, regenerate and retransmit the signal at every repeater. In the
optical communication by solitons, there exists a certain problem about the interaction of
two solitons. What are the main factors that determine the interaction? It is shown that the
time interval, the relative phase of the two solitons, and the amplitude of them are the
major factors. There is one criterion to in the soliton communication field, the
transmission capacity, which equals to the product of Bit rate and distance. France
Telecom keeps the record in 1995, The bit rate is 20 Gb/s, and the distance is 150,000
km.

Reference :

1. Stefanto Loughi, Dark solitons in degenerate optical

parametric oscillators, Optics Letters. Vol.21, no. 12

2. A. D. Boardman et al., Magnetic Control of Optical

Spatial Solitons, Physics Review Letters. 75. 4591 (1995)

3. Guoquan Zhang et al., Optical dark and bright spatial

solitons in photorefractive media, Physics Letters. A 204
(1995)146-150
4. Ze Zhang et al., Optical "Multiexcitons" Quantum Gap
Solitons in Nonlinear Bragg Reflectors, Physics Review
Letters. 75. 3430 (1995)

5. Hermann A. Haus and Williams S. Wong, Solitons in

optical communication, Review of Modern Physics. Vol.
68. No. 2, April 1996.