Pulse Transmission Through a Dielectric Optical Waveguide

Abstract

Waveguide propagation of a pulse-modulated carrier wave is formulated to include distortion due to dispersion in both attentuation and phase velocity. An optimum input gaussian pulse width exists for maximum information carrying capacity. Results are applied to a numerical study of several singlemode glass optical waveguides in which mode and dielectric dispersion may total zero at some wavelength. For our low-loss (20 dB/km) guides in kilometer lengths, information rates of at least 3 x 10(10) bits/sec should be attainable.