Fast optimization procedures for third-order dispersion management

With higher bit rates in optical data transmission, pulses become shorter in time domain, thus increasing the importance of higher order perturbations like third-order dispersion or the Raman term. These additional terms break the symmetry in time of the Nonlinear Schrodinger equation. A degradation of the transmission quality may occur. Here, it is demonstrated that almost the full quality may be restored when one applies a careful optimized third-order dispersion management, additionally to second-order dispersion management. We show that third-order dispersion can be treated in the framework of a Gauss-Hermite expansion leading to a finite dimensional approximation. As an important result we show that well-optimized third-order dispersion management significantly enhances the performance of both, a symmetric second-order dispersion map and an aperiodic map of a real 40 Gb/s transmission system. All analytical results are confirmed by full numerical simulations. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.