Recent studies of soliton formation in a Raman amplifier by a π phase shift have shown that the soliton will decay if the input Stokes beam is off resonance. Initial experiments indicated that this soliton decay is related to frequency shifts of the input Stokes beam that result from quantum fluctuations. In this paper we use the quantum statistics of the Raman spectral fluctuations to compare the predicted decay statistics of the soliton decay with the experimentally measured distribution. We find that, as conjectured, the soliton decay is directly related to the statistics of the initiating quantum fluctuations.

• Received 8 August 1991

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.45.450