Novel fibers for soliton communications

Summary form only given. Solitons continue to be an active area of research for high-capacity transmission and high-speed all-optical processing. In conjunction with proposed system architectures and optical processing configurations are fiber designs with new radial refractive-index profiles and introducing axial variation. This talk reviews recent developments in fiber design and fabrication that may enable the commercial deployment of soliton networks. Fibers with high nonlinearity, dispersion tapering and built-in dispersion management will be discussed in detail.