Abstract

It is known that the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) causes an excess loss by reflecting the launched signal light back into the transmitter. This effect limits the maximum transmitted power in optical fiber communication systems. In this paper we describe another harmful effect that may be caused by the SBS. We show that if the SBS occurs in fiber, the transmitted and scattered light have intensity fluctuations, which is explained as the noise partly from amplified spontaneous Brillouin scattering and partly from the optical chaos.

© 1992 Optical Society of America