Effect of fiber nonlinearity on the propagation of highly chirped pulses in a WDM system

Summary form only given. Fiber nonlinearities generally result in system impairments. Consequently it is necessary to employ countermeasures, such as spans with alternating signs of dispersion, to counteract their detrimental effects. However, we observe for pulses that initially have a large anomalous chirp, fiber nonlinearities can actually have beneficial effects. Namely we observe that these pulses undergo spectral narrowing due to the interaction of self-phase-modulation with their initial chirp.