Soliton interaction in birefringent optical fibers: Effects of nonlinear gain devices

Abstract

This paper presents the influences of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) on the performance of soliton transmission system in birefringent fibers. Dispersive waves generated in single mode fibers due to PMD degrade the soliton transmission system in two aspects. First, solitons continuously lose their energy, thus cause enhancement in pulse width. Second, the dispersive waves interact with neighboring pulses and cause distortion in a sequence of pulses. Both these effects reduce the effective bit-rate and degrade the performance of high-speed optical transmission systems. Optical fibers with large group velocity dispersion (GVD) have less dispersive waves and are relatively robust to pulse broadening, but it enhances the interaction between the adjacent pulses. In this paper, we analyzed these effects of PMD on soliton propagation in birefringent fibers and introduced nonlinear gain devices with perturbation terms proportional to second and fourth power of amplitudes to reduce these effects. We proposed Symmetric Split-Step Fourier Method to solve the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations (CNLSE); which yields better results over the existing Split-Step Fourier Method.