Optical soliton switching in a nonlinear fibre Sagnac interferometer

The authors demonstrate the excellent transmission characteristics of soliton-like pulses. The nonlinear fibre Sagnac interferometer is a good configuration for demonstrating optical soliton switching as it is insensitive to external perturbations, requires no interferometric adjustment of path length and enables them to use long lengths of optical fibre. They demonstrate for the first time, complete pulse switching for soliton-like pulses. A nonlinear transmission coefficient of 93% was obtained which should be compared with the linear transmission of 2.5%. The results confirm the viability of optical solitons as the natural bits for nonlinear optical processing in an all fibre geometry