Long-haul propagation analysis of dark pulses employing an optical recirculating fiber loop technique

Abstract Dark pulses have been the subject of intense research nowadays. Several investigations constantly report fascinating insights into the fundamental physics of these structures generally observed in all-optical fiber schemes. In this paper, we investigated the experimental propagation of dark pulses at different optical fiber lengths. Distances as long as 1000 km were obtained by applying an optical recirculating fiber loop technique. Our results reveal that the dark pulses after propagating 1000 km on a standard single-mode fiber had a broadening rate of 0.114 ps/km, and a pulse-to-pulse timing jitter of 160 ps. These results provide the first experimental evidence that dark pulses may be successfully employed in long-distance optical applications.