Diffusion of optical pulses in dispersion-shifted randomly birefringent optical fibers

An effect of polarization-mode dispersion, nonlinearity and random variation of dispersion along an optical fiber on a pulse propagation in a randomly birefringent dispersion-shifted optical fiber with zero average dispersion is studied. An averaged pulse width is shown analytically to diffuse with propagation distance for arbitrary strong pulse amplitude. It is found that optical fiber nonlinearity can not change qualitatively a diffusion of pulse width but can only modify a diffusion law which means that a root mean square pulse width grows at least as a linear function of the propagation distance.