Statistics of the Nonlinear Discrete Spectrum of a Noisy Pulse

In the presence of additive Gaussian noise, the statistics of the Nonlinear Fourier Transform (NFT) of a pulse are not yet completely known in closed form. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to study this problem. Our contributions are twofold: first, we extend the existing Fourier Collocation (FC) method to compute the whole discrete spectrum (eigenvalues and spectral amplitudes). We show numerically that the accuracy of FC is comparable to the state-of-the-art NFT algorithms. Second, we apply perturbation theory of linear operators to derive analytic expressions for the joint statistics of the eigenvalues and the spectral amplitudes when a pulse is contaminated by additive Gaussian noise. Our analytic expressions closely match the empirical statistics obtained through simulations.