Solitons in Optical FIbers : A Golden Jubilee and some very Bright Prospects

Lecture given on the 8th of october 2024 in Burgundy, with a focus on the history of solitons in Burgundy. The lecture was given for a workshop honouring the venue of Pr. Govind Agrawal at the University of Burgundy.

-- French version (with some parts excluded) available :    • Le soliton, une vague extraordinaire à Dijon  

The soliton is a waveform with the rare feature of being able to propagate without deformation, despite a priori destructive effects such as dispersion and nonlinearity. These strange waves were first observed in 1834 in Scotland in a canal: the engineer John Scott Russell was then taken aback by a mysterious wave of high amplitude capable of travelling for several kilometres while remaining identical to itself.
Such observations were reproduced in a Dijon reach of the Burgundy Canal by Henry Darcy and Henry Bazin in the middle of the nineteenth century before a mathematical treatment rigorously explained the origin of these waves as resulting from a perfect balance between dispersion and nonlinearity.
Since then, soliton has been a major subject of study that has gone far beyond the field of hydraulics. It has been observed in different materials, in atomic or quantum physics, in power lines, in chains of mechanical oscillators, in DNA strands, in meteorology, etc. and in optics! Indeed, with the advent of lasers capable of generating high amplitude light pulses, and following the development of optical fibers, researchers have numerically predicted the existence of solitons in optical fibers.

That was 50 years ago and this concept has opened the door to many innovations in optical telecommunications, in the field of lasers. The study of solitons holds a special place at the University of Burgundy with work carried out for several decades exploring both technological applications and the most fundamental aspects. This is the priority theme of the researchers of the SAFIR team (Solitons, lAsers, Fibres and InfraRed Photonics) of the photonics department.

see also:
hydrodynamic soliton:    • Hydrodynamic soliton  
Kruskal work:    • Recurrence in KdV equation  
collisions of hydrodynamic solitons:    • Collision of KdV solitons  
solitons in a pendulum chain:    • Présentation de solitons dans une chaîne d...  
profile of the Peregrine soliton:    • Peregrine soliton  
experimental demonstration of the Peregrine soliton:    • Peregrine soliton in nonlinear fiber optic...  

#soliton #nonlinearfiber