  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.
