Abstract

Phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSA) have advanced features for repeater amplifiers such as not adding spontaneous-emission noise, suppressing Gorden-Haus jitter in soliton transmission¹ and recovering the pulse broadening caused by group velocity dispersion of fiber.² So far, PSA operation with less than 8-dB gain has been confirmed by using χ⁽²⁾ nonlinear material³ and a nonlinear fiber loop mirror (NOLM).⁴ We achieve very large phase-sensitive gains above 20 dB by using a subpicosecond pulse-excited NOLM with 3-km zero-dispersion fiber. It is also demonstrated for the first time that amplitude fluctuation in the input signal is suppressed by using the PSA as a limiting amplifier.

© 1996 Optical Society of America