Propagation properties of chirped soliton pulses in optical nonlinear Kerr media

An investigation is made of the formation of a single soliton, or a pair of solitons, from initially nontransform limited pulses in a nonlinear Kerr medium having anomalous dispersion. A qualitative physical explanation is given for the formation of soliton pairs. Approximate solutions for the amplitudes and the velocities of the generated solitons are established and corroborated by numerical solutions of the Zakharov-Shabat eigenvalue problem.