Supramolecular transmission of soliton-encoded bit streams over astronomical distances

A stream of optical pulses, transmitted over long distances in optical fiber, will be affected by a variety of noise sources, leading to degradation in the signal-to-noise ratio. This noise accumulation sets generic capacity limits of all fiber-based optical signal transmission systems and has long been regarded as unavoidable. We report that by tailoring long-range, non-covalent inter-pulse interactions, optical solitons in a fiber laser loop can robustly couple to each other and self-assemble into supramolecular structures that exhibit long-term stability, elementary diversity and the possibility of information encoding. We demonstrate error-free transmission of such self-assembled solitonic structures over many astronomical units without any active retiming, opening up the possibility of using bit-bit interactions to overcome noise accumulation in optical fiber telecommunications and bit-storage systems.