Research Colloquium — Wednesday, November 8, 2006

When two solitons propagating in an optical fiber with different group velocities (corresponding to different frequency channels) collide in the presence of Raman scattering they exchange energy, and as a result, their amplitudes change. Taking into account this energy exchange and the stochastic character of pulse sequences in different frequency channels we show that the soliton amplitude and frequency shift become random variables with normalized n-th moments that increase exponentially with both propagation distance and n^2. This implies that the soliton parameters in these weakly nonlinear systems exhibit intermittent dynamic behavior, a surprising result, since intermittency is typically associated with strongly nonlinear phenomena such as turbulence and chaotic flow. Moreover, we demonstrate that this intermittent dynamics can have important practical consequences by leading to relatively large values of the bit-error-rate characterizing the system performance.