Dynamics of solitons in filtered dispersion-managed systems

We present measurements of the temporal evolution of soliton propagation in a dispersion managed fiber transmission line containing one optical bandpass filter in each map period. The pulses expand and compress in time due to the local dispersion with two minima per map cycle, one in the middle of the anomalous and the other in the middle of the normal section of the fiber map. The pulses are nearly transform limited at the minima with Gaussian-like spectra. A new type of soliton behavior is indicated by the fact that the dynamics, measured bit-error rate (BER), excess gain, and pulse stability do not vary with path-averaged dispersion from 0.02 to 0.08 ps/nm/km.