Ultrashort Laser Pulse Phenomena, 2nd Edition

590 Selected Applications

13.2. SOLITONS

The concept of solitons has already appeared in various chapters of this book.

For instance, we saw in Chapter 5 how an elementary model for a laser cavity,

including only SPM and dispersion, leads to the nonlinear Schrödinger equa-

tion, which has steady-state soliton solutions. The same model applied to fibers

finds stable pulse shapes propagating without distortion over long distances. We

saw in Chapter 8 how solitons could be used for the shaping of fs pulses. This

application transcends the fs time domain: In communication, pulse durations in

the range of 20 to 80 ps are propagated without distortion through tens of km

of fibers or over 10

6

pulse lengths. The solitons used for pulse-coded commu-

nication, which ...