New services and applications are causing an exponential increase in internet
traffic. In a few years, current fiber optic communication system
infrastructure will not be able to meet this demand because fiber nonlinearity
dramatically limits the information transmission rate. Eigenvalue communication
could potentially overcome these limitations. It relies on a mathematical
technique called "nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT)" to exploit the "hidden"
linearity of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation as the master model for
signal propagation in an optical fiber. We present here the theoretical tools
describing the NFT for the Manakov system and report on experimental
transmission results for dual polarization in fiber optic eigenvalue
communications. A transmission of up to 373.5 km with bit error rate less than
the hard-decision forward error correction threshold has been achieved. Our
results demonstrate that dual-polarization NFT can work in practice and enable
an increased spectral efficiency in NFT-based communication systems, which are
currently based on single polarization channels