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

Brillouin optical time-domain analysis sensor assisted by Brillouin distributed amplification of pump pulses

Javier Urricelqui, Mikel Sagues, and Alayn Loayssa
Opt. Express 23(23) 30448-30458 (2015)

Increasing robustness of bipolar pulse coding in Brillouin distributed fiber sensors

Zhisheng Yang, Marcelo A. Soto, and Luc Thévenaz
Opt. Express 24(1) 586-597 (2016)

Analysis of pulse modulation format in coded BOTDA sensors

Marcelo A. Soto, Gabriele Bolognini, and Fabrizio Di Pasquale
Opt. Express 18(14) 14878-14892 (2010)

Measurement of nonlinear parameter of an optical fiber based on Brillouin optical time-domain analysis

Hongying Zhang, Shaopeng Zhang, Zhijun Yuan, Ziye Liu, Yongkang Dong, Dengwang Zhou, Wei Gao, and Yuelan Lv
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 33(4) 630-636 (2016)

High-resolution long-range distributed Brillouin analysis using dual-layer phase and amplitude coding

Yosef London, Yair Antman, Raphael Cohen, Naama Kimelfeld, Nadav Levanon, and Avi Zadok
Opt. Express 22(22) 27144-27158 (2014)