Optical solitons: Perspectives and applications

This article serves as an introduction to the focus issue on optical solitons. After a short review of the history of solitons and the field of integrable systems, a brief overview of the development of nonlinear optics and optical solitons is provided. Next, the various contributions to this focus issue are presented, and a few separate remarks are devoted to optical communications, where solitons promise to play a decisive role in the next generation of commercial systems. (c) 2000 American Institute of Physics.