Interchannel interaction of optical solitons.

We study interaction between two solitons from different frequency channels propagating in an optical fiber. The interaction may be viewed as an inelastic collision, in which energy is lost to continuous radiation due to small but finite third order dispersion. We develop a perturbation theory with two small parameters: the third order dispersion coefficient d(3), and the reciprocal of the interchannel frequency difference, 1/beta.