Reduction of phase jitter in dispersion-managed systems by in-line filtering

The influence of in-line filters on the phase jitter of chirped optical pulses propagating in arbitrary dispersion-managed systems is studied with a semianalytic moment method. Because of its stabilizing effect on the amplitude, filtering reduces the nonlinear phase jitter that accumulates through self-phase modulation. As in the case of constant-dispersion soliton links, we observe that the phase variance grows only linearly with distance in the presence of filtering. Phase jitter reduction is observed and accurately predicted by the moment method in two dispersion-managed systems with different levels of nonlinearity and filter strength.