Recent Insights about Solitons in Optical Fibers

Abstract

Fiber-optic solitons were predicted in 1973, demonstrated in 1980, and found their first commercial use in 2002. One might consider the topic mature and well understood, but nonlinear processes always hold surprises, and current research keeps producing novelties. Formation of a soliton ensemble in a feedback arrangement is discussed in the context of supercontinuum generation. The emergence of solitons from a noisy continuous wave is revisited in terms of an Akhmediev breather using scattering eigenvalues. Moreover, investigations into bound states of solitons (soliton molecules) will be presented; it was shown very recently that these objects may permit nonbinary optical data coding.