Signal-noise interaction in nonlinear optical fibers: a hydrodynamic approach.

We present a new perturbative approach to the study of signal-noise interactions in nonlinear optical fibers. The approach is based on the hydrodynamic formulation of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation that governs the propagation of light in the fiber. Our method is discussed in general and is developed in more details for some special cases, namely the small-dispersion regime, the continuous-wave (CW) signal and the solitonic pulse. The accuracy of the approach is numerically tested in the CW case.