Detrimental effect of self-phase modulation on the performance of Brillouin distributed fiber sensors

Abstract

We show that the spectral broadening of the pump pulse through self-phase modulation in a time-domain distributed Brillouin sensor has a considerably detrimental effect in the measurement, especially in the case of long distances and high-resolution pulses. Using $30\mathrm{ns}$ pump pulses with peak power of $276\mathrm{mW}$, self-phase modulation leads to a doubling of the effective gain linewidth after some $20\mathrm{km}$, which is equivalent to a contrast loss of $2\mathrm{dB}$ in the measurement. The impact is higher for shorter pulses (higher resolution). The theoretical modeling is fully confirmed by experimental results.

© 2011 Optical Society of America

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