NALM-based, phase-preserving 2R regenerator of high-duty-cycle pulses

We explore the potential of the nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM)-based phase-preserving 2R (reamplification and reshaping) regenerator for simultaneous regeneration of multiple wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) channels. While not considering nonlinear multi-channel propagation, we address two issues of the phase-preserving NALM that appear to us as the major obstacles in adopting it for realistic WDM applications: a high operating power and a detrimental effect of non-small (33% - 50%) pulse duty cycles. After thorough optimization, we find a new operating regime of this regenerator with the non-small duty-cycle capability and approximately an order of magnitude reduction of the required operating power. In addition, we show that the plateau in the input-output power transfer curve does not automatically lead to the reduction of the amplitude jitter, which is particularly noticeable for the non-small duty-cycle pulses.