This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the International Symposium of Physics and Application of Optical Solitons in Fibers held in Kyoto during November 14 to 17,1995. As a result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and increased scientific interests from the soliton community, research on optical solitons in fibers has made a remarkable progress in recent years. In view of these trends, and with the support of the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, the Research Group for Optical Soliton Communications (ROSC), chaired by Akira Hasegawa, was established in Japan in April 1995 to promote collaboration and information exchange 'among communication service companies, industries and academic circles in the theory and application of optical solitons. This symposium was organized as a part of the ROSC activities. The symposium attracted enthusiastic response by worldwide researchers involved in this subject which has lead to the most intensive meeting that the editor ever attended. The reader will find the contents to be well-balanced among theory, experiment and technology. Although the evaluation of the contents shall naturally depend on the particular area of interest of the reader, the symposium has confirmed that the soliton based light wave transmission has achieved the best result in one channel, both in distance of transmission and in bitrate although in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems, NRZ transmission has yet better result.

Dispersion As Control Parameter in Soliton Transmission Systems.- Dispersion Managements on Soliton Transmission in Fibers with Lumped Amplifiers.- A Dispersion-Allocated Soliton and Its Impact on Soliton Communication.- NRZ Soliton Transmission Scheme.- Perturbed Solitons in Birefringent Fibres.- Parametric Cooling of Solitons.- Nonlinear Theory of Soliton Instabilities.- Stochastic Instability of Chirped Optical Solitons in Media with Periodic Amplification.- Femtosecond Pulse Generation from Semiconductor Lasers Using Soliton Effect Compression and Its Application to Ultrafast Electro-Optic Sampling Measurements.- Ultrahigh Bit Rate Generation and Applications.- Monolithic Mode-Locked Semiconductor Lasers for High Speed Optical Communication Systems.- Generation of Solitonic Pulses in CW-Pumped Brillouin or Raman Fiber-Ring Lasers.- High-Speed Fiber Transmission Using Optical Phase Conjugation.- Design and Characterization of Optical Fibers for High Capacity Transmission.- Application of Optical Soliton for Ultra-Fast Long-Haul Transmission and Measurement Technology.- Alternatives for Soliton Transmission over Transoceanic Distances.- Soliton Family and Solitonics.- Optical Cavitons.- Linear Perspective of Solitons.- Dispersion Decreasing Fibres for Soliton Generation and Transmission Line Loss Compensation.- Effects of Nonlinear Gain on Soliton Transmission in Fibers.- Nonlinear Polarization Mode Dispersion in Optical Fibers with Randomly Varying Birefringence.- The Application of Optical Phase Conjugation in Soliton Communications.- Effect of Mutual Interactions on the Bit-Rate in Soliton Communication Systems.- Future Undersea Systems - Will Soliton Be Needed?.- Implementable Soliton System Design.- Breathing Soliton in Cascaded Transmission System with PassiveDispersion Compensation.- Multi-Ten Gbit/s Soliton Transmission over Transoceanic Distances.- List of Contributors.