THE EVOLUTION OF SOLITONS FROM NON-TRANSFORM LIMITED PULSES

We have examined the effect of chirp and phase noise on the formation of solitons in optical fibres. The Zakharov-Shabat direct scattering problem is solved to find the discrete eigenvalue spectrum which characterises the solitons. Contrary to recent work, our results show that the solitons are stable with respect to quite large effects of both chirp and phase noise. In addition, we have integrated the nonlinear Schroedinger equation over sufficiently large distances to show the residual soliton clearly separating from the radiation, as predicted by our scattering results.