Guided Wave Optical Components and Devices

CHAPTER 6

Some Important Nonlinear Effects in Optical Fibers

K. Thyagarajan^*

Ajoy Ghatak^†,     Physics Department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

1 INTRODUCTION

The development of low loss optical fibers, compact and efficient semiconductor lasers operating at room temperatures, optical detectors, and optical amplifiers has truly revolutionized the field of telecommunications. When information-carrying light pulses propagate through an optical fiber, they suffer from attenuation, temporal broadening, and even interact with each other through nonlinear effects in the fiber. These effects tend to distort the signals, resulting in loss of information or in cross-talk among different channels. Increased channel capacity ...