Shaping lightwaves in time and frequency for optical fiber communication.

In optical communications, sphere shaping is used to limit the energy of lightwaves to within a certain value over a period. This minimizes the energy required to contain information, allowing the rate of information transmission to approach the theoretical limit if the transmission medium is linear. However, when shaped lightwaves are transmitted through optical fiber, Kerr nonlinearity manifests itself as nonlinear interference in a peculiar way, potentially lowering communications capacity.