A new robust regime for a dispersion-managed multichannel 2R regenerator

We study the performance of a multichannel version [M. Vasilyev and T.I. Lakoba, Opt. Lett. 30, 1458 (2005)] of the all-optical Mamyshev regenerator in a practically important situation where one of its key components - a periodic-group-delay device - has a realistic amplitude characteristic of a bandpass filter. We show that in this case, the regenerator can no longer operate in the regime reported in our original paper. Instead, we have found a new regime in which the regenerator's performance is robust not only to such filtering, but also to considerable variations of regenerator parameters. In this regime, the average dispersion of the regenerator must be (relatively) large and anomalous, in constrast to what was considered in all earlier studies of such (single-channel) regenerators based on spectral broadening followed by off-center filtering. In addition, hardware implementation of a regenerator in the new regime is somewhat simpler than that in the original regime.