The good and bad of nonlinear effects in optical data transmission

The importance of both linear and nonlinear effects increases very rapidly with the capacity of the transmission systems. The joint action of the linear and nonlinear effects produces a great variety of optical phenomena in transmission systems. Many of these effects can easily distort the signal so that the data will be completely lost. Nevertheless, by an appropriate design of the system one can greatly reduce the detrimental consequences of these phenomena and even extract important benefits from the nonlinear effects. This can be achieved when soliton pulses are used as the transmission bits. Solitons are nondispersive in the presence of the fiber dispersion and nonlinearity.