Odyssey of Light in Nonlinear Optical Fibers

Foreword

Optical fiber waveguides provide very rich media for research and applications in modern optics because of the combination of small (group) dispersion and matching nonlinearity coupled with impressively small dissipation. Light waves in fiber waveguides propagate three-dimensionally but the energy or information represented by the envelope of the light waves propagates one-dimensionally in the direction of the fiber. Thus the dynamical evolution of information in fiber waveguides can be treated in one space dimension and time coordinates. The evolution equation including cubic non-linearity and group dispersion (without loss), called the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, is integrable and the characteristic solution is given by (optical) ...