“…The reason is that the high peak power leads to a momentary depletion of the gain, since the capture process is not able to keep up with the rate of stimulated emission, and a nonequilibrium situation is created, corresponding to dot-barrier hole-burning. However, the presence of gain saturation in this regime of operation will not lead to pattern effects, contrary to the case of bulk and QW SOAs, where operation close to the saturation point commonly leads to strong pattern effects for pulsed signals [37]. The reason for the difference is that in this regime the gain recovers on the timescale of the capture time, i.e., within picoseconds, whereas the gain in bulk and QW SOAs recovers on the timescale of the effective carrier lifetime, i.e., hundreds of picoseconds.…”