PERTURBATIONS OF OPTICAL SOLITONS

A perturbation theory is developed to investigate the effects of vario us perturbations on soliton propagation down an optical fiber. The the ory is formulated within the ''natural'' framework of inverse scatteri ng theory. The perturbative effects of third-order dispersion, the sol iton self-frequency shift, bandwidth-limited gain, periodic modulation , and stochastic fluctuations are analyzed in detail. In each case, th e analytic results presented here are in excellent agreement with simu lations carried out here and elsewhere.