Richard Clark wrote:

On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:55:09 -0600, Tom Ring
wrote:


Someone, I think it may have been Richard, once mentioned a form of
distortion that was due, I think, to the modulation itself.


Hi Tom,

There are several, some that are way out in the decimals but separable
(Raman scattering). Others like Solitons (a rather old observation)
are used to increase bandwidth in commercial links.

I hesitate to ask what the question is, because all of these effects
require some strain to achieve with very high power densities, often
in the megawatts to gigawatts. If you can find a suitably fast pulse
source, you might do it on a kitchen table. The hardest part of
getting a lot of optical power into a small fiber is overcoming
Numerical Aperture mismatch (sound familiar once you discard the NA?).
Some sources take this in stride (notably semiconductor lasers), while
others (like the sun) are stunningly inefficient.
snip

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

This came up last night while we were putting racks together for a new
data center. Someone mentioned that it was theoretically possible to
put an infinite amount of information through a fiber because you could
have an infinite number of carriers even though the total available
frequency response was finite. I declined to argue with him, because he
is always right, even when he's not. That reminded me of something I
thought you mentioned months ago. You either named the effect, or gave
a link to an article about it.

And NA mismatch doesn't ring any bells.

thanks,
tom
K0TAR