Optical solitons in fibers are a beautiful example of how an abstract mathematical concept has had an impact on new information transmission technologies. The concept of all-optical data transmission with optical soliton systems is now setting the standard for the most advanced transmission systems. The book deals with the motion of light waves in optical fibers, the evolution of light wavepackets, optical information transfer, all-optical soliton transmission systems, the control of optical solitons, polarization effects, dispersion-managed solitons, WDM transmission, soliton lasers, all-optical switching and other applications. This book is a must for all researchers and graduate students active in the field of optical data transmission.

This text summarizes the invited papers presented at the International Symposium on New Trends in Optical Soliton Transmission Systems held in Kyoto, Japan in the fall of 1997. The symposium is the second of the series and is considered to be the most representative symposium on the use of optical solitons for ultrafast communications. In particular, this symposium focuses on the newly developed technologies of dispersion management to improve soliton transmission capabilities. Studies of properties of new solitons that appear in fibres with periodic variation of dispersion are also presented.

This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the International Symposium of Physics and Application of Optical Solitons in Fibers held in Kyoto during November 14 to 17,1995. As a result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and increased scientific interests from the soliton community, research on optical solitons in fibers has made a remarkable progress in recent years. In view of these trends, and with the support of the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Research Group for Optical Soliton Communications (ROSC), chaired by Akira Hasegawa, was established in Japan in April 1995 to promote collaboration and information exchange 'among communication service companies, industries and academic circles in the theory and application of optical solitons. This symposium was organized as a part of the ROSC activities. The symposium attracted enthusiastic response by worldwide researchers involved in this subject which has lead to the most intensive meeting that the editor ever attended. The reader will find the contents to be well-balanced among theory, experiment and technology. Although the evaluation of the contents shall naturally depend on the particular area of interest of the reader, the symposium has confirmed that the soliton based light wave transmission has achieved the best result in one channel, both in distance of transmission and in bitrate although in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems, NRZ transmission has yet better result.

This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the International Symposium on New Trends in Optical Soliton Transmission Systems held in Kyoto during November 18 - 21, 1997. As a result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and increased scientific interest from the soliton community, research on optical solitons in fibres has made remarkable progress in recent years. In view of these trends, the Research Group for Optical Soliton Communications (ROSC), chaired by Akira Hasegawa, was established in Japan in April 1995 to promote collaboration and information exchange among communication service companies, industries and academic circles in the theory and application of optical solitons. This symposium was organized as a part of the ROSC activities. As with the 1 st ROSC symposium, this symposium attracted enthusiastic response from worldwide researchers involved in the subject of soliton based communications and intensive discussions were held throughout the symposium. Particular emphases were made to dispersion managements of soliton transmission. I would like to note that in the }'t symposium the (adiabatic) dispersion managements just began to appear in reducing radiation at amplifiers and reducing collision effects in WDM system. These have become standard this time, but in addition new, non-adiabatic dispersion managements have been introduced independently by various scientists all over the world.

During the 30 years of space exploration, important discoveries in the near-earth environment such as the Van Allen belts, the plasmapause, the magnetotail and the bow shock, to name a few, have been made. Coupling between the solar wind and the magnetosphere and energy transfer processes between them are being identified. Space physics is clearly approaching a new era, where the emphasis is being shifted from discoveries to understanding. One way of identifying the new direction may be found in the recent contribution of atmospheric science and oceanography to the development of fluid dynamics. Hydrodynamics is a branch of classical physics in which important discoveries have been made in the era of Rayleigh, Taylor, Kelvin and Helmholtz. However, recent progress in global measurements using man-made satellites and in large scale computer simulations carried out by scientists in the fields of atmospheric science and oceanography have created new activities in hydrodynamics and produced important new discoveries, such as chaos and strange attractors, localized nonlinear vortices and solitons. As space physics approaches the new era, there should be no reason why space scientists cannot contribute, in a similar manner, to fundamental discoveries in plasma physics in the course of understanding dynamical processes in space plasmas.

This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the International Symposium of Physics and Application of Optical Solitons in Fibers held in Kyoto during November 14 to 17,1995. As a result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and increased scientific interests from the soliton community, research on optical solitons in fibers has made a remarkable progress in recent years. In view of these trends, and with the support of the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Research Group for Optical Soliton Communications (ROSC), chaired by Akira Hasegawa, was established in Japan in April 1995 to promote collaboration and information exchange 'among communication service companies, industries and academic circles in the theory and application of optical solitons. This symposium was organized as a part of the ROSC activities. The symposium attracted enthusiastic response by worldwide researchers involved in this subject which has lead to the most intensive meeting that the editor ever attended. The reader will find the contents to be well-balanced among theory, experiment and technology. Although the evaluation of the contents shall naturally depend on the particular area of interest of the reader, the symposium has confirmed that the soliton based light wave transmission has achieved the best result in one channel, both in distance of transmission and in bitrate although in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems, NRZ transmission has yet better result.

Authored by internationally recognized experts on optical solitons, this book addresses the forefront of technology in the important field of optical communications. It deals with topics from the motion of light waves in optical fibres to the evolution of light wavepackets, and other applications.

This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the "International Symposium on Massive TDM and WDM Optical Soliton Tra- mission Systems" held in Kyoto during November 9-12, 1999. The symposium is the third of the series organized by Research Group for Optical Soliton C- munications (ROSC) chaired by Akira Hasegawa. The research group, ROSC, was established in Japan in April 1995 with a support of the Japanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunications to promote collaboration and information - change among communication service companies, communication industries and academic circles in the theory and application of optical solitons. The symposium attracted enthusiastic response from worldwide researchers in the field of soliton based communications and intensive discussions were made. In the symposium held in 1997, new concept of soliton transmission based on dispersion management of optical fibers were presented. This new soliton is now called the dispersion managed soliton. The present symposium mainly focuses the theoretical and experimental developments of dispersion managed solitons. It is remarkable that the concept of the dispersion managed soliton, which was just born two years ago when the naming was not even given yet, has become the center of soliton research in two years. The dispersion managed soliton has an enhanced power in maintaining reasonable signal to noise ratio, yet has reduced Gordon-Haus timing jitter by reduced averagedispersion. The dispersion managed soliton also has demonstrated its power in soliton based WDM transmissions.

Solitons are a fascinating topic for study and a major source of interest for potential application in optical communication. Possibly the first observation of a soliton occurred in 1838 and was made by a clerical gentleman riding a horse along a canal towpath. When a barge under tow came to a stop alongside him the bow wave did not stop, but continued to travel on its own for several miles with no change in shape. At the time this unusual phenomenon was not understood and remained unexplained. Interest was revived with the development of optical fibres and the realisation that at the high intensities possible in their very small cores the onset of non-linear effects could modify the propagation characteristics in a significant way. In a seminal paper in 1973 Hasegawa and Tappert solved a non-linear Schrodinger equation for fibre propagation and found solutions for solitary waves, i.e. solitons. Since then advances have been very rapid resulting in a much better understanding of a wide variety of soliton effects, and, crucially, the realisation that soliton propagation can be used to potentially great advantage in practical long-distance systems. There is, as a result, a wealth of theoretical and experimental research in progress all over the world. At NTT (Japan) a pule-code-modulated soliton train has been transmitted at 10Gbit/s over one million kilometres with zero error! Perhaps all long-distance, large bandwidth communication problems have been solved for ever. This book gives a clear account of the theory and mathematics of solitons travelling in optical fibres. It is written by the authority on the subject.

This book is a collaboration between three artists working in vastly different mediums, brought together by the interconnectedness that today's world facilitates and the friendship and cooperation of many other human points of light, from Japan to Canada to the United States and many more places in between. The work is both local and global, timeless and prudent, hurting and healing, old and new, young and old. The poet, the philosopher, and the visual artist have come together on the most common of grounds, in the artistic moments that lift us out of our mortal cycles and physical environments and into the colorful spaces that transcend our individual lives, our times, our fears, pain, and morality.