Dark solitons are stable in dispersion maps of either sign of path-average dispersion

Summary form only given. It is now well known that optical fiber solitons remain stable, if with some modification, in dispersion-managed fibers. ´Stable´ here refers to a stroboscopic representation with the periodicity of the dispersion map. It was also shown that, somewhat surprisingly, bright solitons even exist if the path-average dispersion is zero, or in a certain parameter range with normal path-average dispersion. We show numerically that the corresponding statement for dark solitons holds: a dispersion-managed fiber with normal path-average dispersion supports stable dark solitons, and it does so even in a parameter range with anomalous path-average dispersion. Numerically we propagate the dark soliton on a super Gaussian background applying the well known split-step Fourier algorithm.