The effects of weak randomness on pulse interactions and four-wave mixing products

In many physical applications that use pulses as information carriers, pulses may be distorted after one or many interactions. These interactions can result in pulse degradation as well as the production of by-products that affect system performance. In nonlinear optical communications systems, particularly wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) soliton systems, pairwise pulse interactions induce four-wave mixing (FWM) product growth. We show here that small random elements in the underlying system (through the dispersion term) reduce the FWM product growth. The weak random dispersion also appears to affect the resonance condition concerning four-wave mixing. Surprisingly, the effect of weak randomness in the dispersion term is shown to have a comparable impact as that of using the much more drastic deterministic dispersion management (DM) technique.