Towards Fast Inverse Nonlinear Fourier Transforms For Fiber-Optic Communications

Sander Wahls

Delft Center for Systems and Control, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Abstract:

When a signal travels through optical fiber, it evolves in a complicated way that is approximately described by the nonlinear Schroedinger equation. However, it turns out that the evolution of a solution to the nonlinear Schroedinger equation becomes simple when it is considered in the so-called nonlinear Fourier domain. This fact has recently started to attract attention in fiber-optic communications, where the idea has risen to encode information in the nonlinear Fourier domain instead of the time or the conventional Fourier domain. The computational complexity of nonlinear Fourier transforms is an important but mostly open problem in this setup. While first fast nonlinear Fourier transforms have been discovered recently, no fast inverse transform has been reported so far. In this talk, I will present some recent (and so far unpublished) results on this problem.

Biography:

Sander Wahls is an Assistant Professor at the Delft Center for Systems and Control at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Before he joined TU Delft, he spend two years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ. Sander received a Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from TU Berlin in Berlin, Germany, in 2011. Earlier, in 2007, he also earned a Dipl.-Math. degree in mathematics from the same university. His current research focus is on applied nonlinear Fourier analysis.