Abstract

We have observed temporal fluctuations in the stimulated Brillouin scattered (SBS) reflected power and complementary changes with the opposite sign in the depleted pump power, during an individual laser pulse. This behavior, shown in Fig. 1, was predicted¹ by a computer model. These fluctuations are macroscopic manifestations of sudden phase jumps of ~π in the noise-generated Stokes electric field that initiates and sustains the stimulated scattering process. Similar fluctuations have been observed in Raman scattering by us and by many others.

© 1991 Optical Society of America