This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at the International Symposium on New Trends in Optical Soliton Transmission Systems held in Kyoto during November 18 - 21, 1997. As a result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and increased scientific interest from the soliton community, research on optical solitons in fibres has made remarkable progress in recent years. In view of these trends, 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. As with the 1 st ROSC symposium, this symposium attracted enthusiastic response from worldwide researchers involved in the subject of soliton based communications and intensive discussions were held throughout the symposium. Particular emphases were made to dispersion managements of soliton transmission. I would like to note that in the }'t symposium the (adiabatic) dispersion managements just began to appear in reducing radiation at amplifiers and reducing collision effects in WDM system. These have become standard this time, but in addition new, non-adiabatic dispersion managements have been introduced independently by various scientists all over the world.

1: Technical Session.- Propagation and Interaction of Optical Solitons in Fibers with Random Parameters.- Soliton Jitter and Collisions in Birefringent Fibres.- Soliton Stability in PMD Perturbed Transmission Systems.- Role of the Dispersive Wave in Soliton Dynamics and Interactions.- Generation of High-repetition-rate Dark Soliton Trains and Frequency Conversion in Optical Fibers.- Studies on Signal Propagation in Optical Fibers with Randomly Varying Birefringence.- Ultra-long Distance Soliton Transmission Line Design by Two-dimensional Pulse Width Evaluation Method.- Practical Design of Dispersion Managed Soliton System.- Photon-number Noise of Spectrally Filtered Optical Solitons.- Variational Approach to Transmission in DM Long Optical Links.- Nonlinear Chirped RZ and NRZ Pulses in Optical Transmission Lines.- Circulating Loop Experiments on Solitons with Periodic Dispersion Management.- 20Gbit/s PDM Soliton Transmission Experiment in Dispersion Compensated Standard Fiber Systems.- Dynamics of Dispersion-managed Solitons in Optical Communications.- Superb Characteristics of Dispersion-allocated Soliton Transmission in TDM and WDM Systems.- Theory of Guiding-center Breathing Soliton Propagation in Optical Communication Systems with Strong Dispersion Management.- Analysis of Gordon-Haus Jitter in Dispersion Compensated Optical Fibers.- Four-wave Mixing in Fiber Links with Dispersion Management.- Statistical Properties of Signals Travelling in Noisy Nonlinearly Dispersive Optical Channels.- Dispersion Management Issues in Long Amplifier-spacing Frequency-guiding Multiwavelength Soliton Systems.- Remarkable Features of DM Solitons: Implications for High Speed and WDM Systems.- Transmission Systems Based on Dispersion-managed Solitons: Theory and Experiment.- Transmission and Collision of Quasi-solitons in Dispersion Managed Optical Fibers.- Long-haul Soliton WDM Transmission with Periodic Dispersion Compensation and Dispersion Slope Compensation.- Ultrafast Networks Using High-speed RZ Optical Pulses for Transmission, Routing and Processing.- 40 Gbit/s Transmission Using Optical Time-division Multiplexing and Demultiplexing.- Broadband and Gain-flattened Optical Fiber Amplifiers.- Passively Mode-locked Semiconductor Lasers Stabilized by Subharmonic Electrical Injection and Their Application to Millimeter Wave Photonics.- 2: Consortium Session.- Ultrafast Soliton Multiple-access Networks.- STAR Project.- ESTHER Project: Practical Implementation of Solitons.- Soliton Transmisson in the European Network.- European Union ACTS Project MIDAS: Objectives and Progress to Date.- List of Contributors.