A Unified Theory of Intrachannel Nonlinearity in Pseudolinear Transmission

The material of this chapter originates from a visit of the author the AT&T Laboratory in Red Bank, NJ in the summer of 2000. During that visit, the author was exposed to some experimental work on transmission using short pulses, which spread very rapidly upon propagation and for this reason were dubbed by Jay Wiesenfeld into “Tedons” from “to ted” which, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, means “to spread or turn from the swath and scatter (as new-mown grass) for drying.” Tedons minimize the effects of nonlinearity by a quick spread, unlike solitons that instead resist to nonlinearity by balancing nonlinearity with dispersion, so that their shape does not change. He teamed up with Carl Clausen and Mark Shtaif and developed a perturbative theory, whose results were presented in a series of three papers 1, 2, 3]. The details of that theory and of its derivations were, however, never published in the open literature. The presentation of these details, together with some later improvements, is the purpose of this chapter.