Soliton stability in optical fibers with polarization-mode dispersion

This letter presents a detailed investigation of how solitons broaden in the presence of polarization-mode dispersion. For a given amount of polarization-mode dispersion and pulsewidth there exists an optimal choice of group-velocity dispersion, for which solitons are most resistant to the effect of polarization-mode dispersion. We also optimize the soliton power enhancement factor and find that solitons can propagate roughly twice the distance compared to linear pulses in the absence of group-velocity dispersion.