Fiber Nonlinearities In Soliton Transmission

The soliton owes its very existence to fiber nonlinearity. As a pulse self-trapped in time, it is able to resist a great many effects, such as chromatic dispersion and polarization dispersion, that are highly destructive of ordinary ("linear") pulses. It is extremely robust in this regard The transmission line picks the soliton out of whatever reasonable pulse is launched into it, and discards the residue as dispersive wave radiation. In a line with amplifiers, the soliton tends to propagate stably over an indefinitely long distance.