ABSTRACT
A widespread idea well beyond the area of optics considers the radiation produced by a perturbed soliton as a restructuring process during which the soliton is endeavoring to get rid of the perturbation. This chapter presents results that suggest that in a slightly perturbed environment, the dynamical behavior of a soliton ramifies into several families, which one call hot solitons, cold solitons and ideal soliton, which correspond, respectively, to pulses that stabilize with an energy level higher than, lower than, and equal to the energy of the non-perturbed soliton. The guiding-center soliton and the dispersion-managed soliton are well-known examples of robust solitons that can propagate over thousands of kilometers. Such solitons propagate in fiber-optic waveguides, which are necessarily made up of the repetition of the same basic structure, called amplification span.
