Simulations of Rare Events in Fiber Optics by Interacting Particle Systems

In this paper we study the robustness of linear pulses, solitons, and dispersionmanaged solitons, under the influence of random perturbations. First, we address the problem of the estimation of the outage probability due to polarization-mode dispersion. Second, we compare the pulse broadening due to random fluctuations of the group-velocity dispersion. We use an original interacting particle system to estimate the tails of the probability density functions of the pulse widths. The method is an adaptative Monte Carlo method that enforces the simulations to probe the regions of practical importance by selection and mutation steps.