Most aspects of optical communications can be described in classical terms. Situations involving just a few photons are sometimes exceptions to this rule. The discussion below is an attempt to show that the Wigner quasiclassical treatment of light fields gives a picture close to the true quantum mechanics, applicable not only to linear processes, but also to weak nonlinear phenomena such as are encountered in the propagation of solitons. In effect, the Wigner picture involves treating vacuum zero-point fluctuations as an integral part of the noise field.
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