Polarization multiplexing with solitons

It is shown both analytically and with numerical simulation, and confirmed experimentally in transmission over distances up to approximately 10000 km, that solitons maintain a high degree of polarization over an ultra-long distance transmission system consisting of birefringent dispersion-shifted fiber segments and erbium amplifiers. Based on that fact, the authors propose a polarization/time division multiplexing technique which should allow the single-wavelength bit-rate capacity of an ultra-long distance soliton transmission system to be doubled with little or no significant increase in bit error rate.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>