ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a history of and current developments in fiber optics. It provides a brief account of types of optical waveguides and the issues of fiber-optic communications. The performance of optical system is limited by several effects that are present in optical fibers and amplifiers. Signal propagation through optical fibers can be affected by group velocity dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, and nonlinear effects. The main nonlinear effects that arise in monomode fibers are Brillouin scattering, Raman scattering, and the Kerr effect. The Kerr effect of nonlinearity is due to the dependence of the fiber refractive index on the field intensity. The intensity dependence of the refractive index leads to a larger number of interesting nonlinear effects. In optical communications systems, information is encoded into light pulses and transmitted through optical fibers over long distances. Taking a look at waveguides, in particular an optical fiber, one can see how solitons promise to revolutionize the field of telecommunications.
