Suppression of soliton jitter and interactions by means of dispersion management

Suppression of interaction between solitons in a nearly dispersion-compensated nonlinear optical link built of alternating segments with opposite values of the dispersion is considered analytically in terms of an effective interaction potential generated by exponentially decaying solitons' tails. It is demonstrated that the effective interaction force is that in the homogeneous fiber divided by a factor equal to a ratio of the actual value of the dispersion to its small mean value. An important result is obtained for the soliton jitter in a similar model, in which, however, the mean dispersion slowly decreases similar to 1/z, rather than being constant. By means of the Fokker-Planck equation for the soliton's random walk, it is shown analytically that this mode of the dispersion management provides a strong suppression of the jitter, so that the mean-square random displacement of the soliton grows only as z, in contrast with the Gordon-Haus growth law z(3). A simple relation between parameters of the corresponding dispersion-management map, providing the strongest jitter suppression, is found. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.