Influence of group-velocity dispersion on multilevel phase-preserving amplitude regeneration in a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror

Numerical simulations have shown a significant influence of group-velocity dispersion (GVD) of the highly nonlinear fiber on the transfer characteristics of a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). The effect is especially strong for the anomalous dispersion regime where an interaction of GVD and self-phase modulation (SPM) leads to formation of high-order solitons. The irregularities of the resulting NALM transfer functions can be used for phase-preserving amplitude regeneration of several, irregular-spaced amplitude states for multi-level modulation formats. The regeneration performance was estimated for a 16QAM signal with three amplitude states where a reduction of amplitude noise without significant signal phase distortions has been observed.