POLARIZATION MULTIPLEXING WITH SOLITONS

We show, both analytically and with numerical simulation, and confirm experimentally in transmission over distances up to approximately 10 000 km, that solitons maintain a high degree of polarization over an ultra-long distance transmission system consisting of birefringent, dispersion-shifted fiber segments and erbium amplifiers. Based on that fact, we further propose a polarization/time division multiplexing technique which should allow the single-wavelength bit-rate capacity of an ultra-long distance soliton transmission system to be doubled with little or no significant increase in bit error rate.