Information capacity of nonlinear wavelength division multiplexing fiber optic transmission line

We report the first determination of the impact of optical nonlinearities on the information capacity of a fiber optic transmission channel. By modeling interchannel interference in a nonlinear wavelength division multiplexing transmission system as multiplicative Gaussian noise, we show that the information capacity is reduced below the Shannon capacity of the linear communications channel. For systems of practical interest, this imposes a fundamental limitation on the spectral efficiency of optical data transmission.