5. Conclusion

Optical transmission has taken solitons out of the mathematicians' notebooks and into the physicists' laboratories. They are very interesting objects because, thanks to their robustness to external perturbations, they can be modeled mathematically in a very simple way, and the accuracy of these models is very good.

This excellent match between theory and experience has enabled us to optimize transmission systems very effectively, and to achieve transmissions over enormous distances (millions of kilometers), far beyond what was even required.

But this kind of modeling did solitons a disservice, as many manufacturers were wary of systems governed by mysterious equations, preferring good old-fashioned systems whose optimization required weeks of numerical simulations.

To transform a laboratory object into an industrial...