A PERTURBATIVE THEORY OF SOLITON PROPAGATION IN THE PRESENCE OF 3RD-ORDER DISPERSION

An ''associate field'' formalism based on an expansion to the inverse scattering transform is applied to the problem of optical soliton pulse propagation perturbed by third order dispersion. The theory provides an almost complete description of the origin, growth and structure in time and frequency of the radiation emitted by and changes to the soliton pulse. The results are supported with numerical calculations. The technique highlights the use of retaining non-soliton terms and generalises previous studies concerned with third order dispersion.