Hermite-Gaussian Nonlinear Spectral Carriers for Optical Communication Systems Employing the Nonlinear Fourier Transform

The nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) is a new field of optical communications that borrows from the methods and concepts of integrable nonlinear equations, to develop new techniques of encoding and transmitting data, which are immune to both nonlinearity and dispersion. Here, we propose orthogonal Hermite-Gaussian spectral forms, known for their efficient time-bandwidth product in linear communications, as waveform carriers for NFT-based telecommunication systems. We demonstrate that the proposed multiplexing scheme outperforms state-of-the-art NFT systems both in terms of spectral efficiency and bit error rate, when the effects of inline noise are neglected.