Decoupling of solitons in cross-phase modulation systems

Using the coupled amplitude-phase formulation, an alternate approach to the inverse scattering transform (IST) for solving the coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equation is presented. The solution method to the nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NSE) for a single soliton described in a previous article is extended to the coupled NSE. The solutions reveal certain criteria for decoupling two copropagating solitons in an XPM system. The dynamics of soliton propagation are confirmed by numerical simulations with the use of the local interpolatary cardinal spline (LICS) method. The results agree well with theoretical prediction. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.