Nonlinear Fiber Optics, 6th Edition

Chapter 5

Optical solitons

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the study of pulse propagation in optical fibers in the regime in which both the group-velocity dispersion (GVD) and self-phase modulation (SPM) are equally important and must be considered simultaneously. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.1 considers the phenomenon of modulation instability and shows that propagation of a continuous-wave (CW) beam inside optical fibers is inherently unstable because of the nonlinear phenomenon of SPM and leads to formation of a pulse train in the anomalous-dispersion regime of optical fibers. Section 5.2 discusses the inverse-scattering method and uses it to obtain soliton solutions of the underlying wave-propagation equation. The properties ...