Experimental demonstration of long-distance dispersion-managed soliton propagation at zero average dispersion

Summary form only given. By using dispersion-managed solitons (DMS) rather than standard solitons, it is possible to nearly eliminate the timing jitter, one of the major sources of error in soliton communications. Theoretical investigations show that when the average dispersion D~ is normal, the DMS has a large stretching factor and only exists in a narrow range of normal D~ on the order of 0.01 ps/nm-km. These factors make observation of solitons when D~ is normal harder than when D~ is anomalous.