Solitons in dispersion-managed fibers: Bond of the soliton molecule

The future of optical data transmission is driven by the ever-growing demand for higher data rates. Bound states of adjacent fiber-optic solitons in dispersion managed (DM) fibers, called soliton molecules, may offer an improvement. Such double pulses appear in DM fibers and by necessity the pulses have to be in opposite phase. It is remarkable that in such a soliton molecule, at a certain close distance the interaction force provides a stable equilibrium. We demonstrated this recently, both numerically and with a full experimental characterization of amplitude and phase.