In this paper, stimulated Brillouin scattering induced noise in Brillouin optical time domain analyzers is experimentally and theoretically investigated. The noise mainly comes from the beating between the probe wave and the spontaneous Brillouin scattering component and from phase-to-intensity conversion. The noise in the time and frequency domain has been measured along the fiber. The results reveal that, compared to gain based sensors, the loss based ones show a lower Brillouin induced noise level. Furthermore, the Brillouin noise is characterized in dependence on the spatial resolution. This investigation provides a deep insight to the frequency dependence of the noise distribution, which might contribute to signal-to-noise ratio enhancement in Brillouin-based distributed sensing.
Brillouin spectrum engineering for the enhancement of slope-assisted Brillouin dynamic sensing is investigated by simulation. By superimposing the Brillouin gain with Brillouin losses, the tradeoff between the dynamic range and the frequency-to-amplitude sensitivity becomes more flexible. Compared to a conventional dynamic Brillouin sensor, a simultaneous enhancement of the dynamic range by 60.27% and the sensitivity by 51.21% has been achieved with the proper parameters. Due to these enhancements, the proposed sensor is 33.87% more robust to system noise and provides a more than 2.2 times of accuracy improvement for strain signal recovery.
With the lowest threshold, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is one of the most common nonlinear effects in optical fibers. Due to the Kramers-Kronig relation, every SBS interaction is inevitably accompanied by a phase response, providing an excellent chance for dispersion manipulation. By engineering the Brillouin gain spectrum, numerous demanding requirements on dispersion engineering can be fufilled via SBS interactions in various applications. In this paper, examples of gain spectrum engineering and dispersion engineering for Brillouin static and dynamic sensing will be presented. With a well engineered gain spectrum, a static Brillouin sensor is more robust to noise and offers a 3-dB measurement accuracy enhancement. In simulations, more than one magnitude of sensitivity enhancement has been demonstrated for dynamic sensors.
We present for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a novel method to improve the measurement accuracy of Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers (BOTDA) by engineering the gain spectrum of the Brillouin interaction. As will be shown, the engineered spectrum shape is more robust against noise and leads to a doubled frequency accuracy of the sensor. Since with the proposed method the frequency error is less susceptible to the intrinsic fiber loss, the sensing range can be extended by up to 60%. This work might open a new way to improve the BOTDA sensing performance with an engineered spectrum shape.
In this paper, an investigation on the working point of slope-assisted dynamic distributed Brillouin sensing is presented. A comparison has been carried out between the sensing performances achieved at the inflection point and the 3 dB point of the Brillouin gain spectrum. Besides the intrinsic 13.1% frequency-to-amplitude sensitivity enhancement and a higher signal level, the dynamic sensing at the inflection point can achieve a doubled in maximum and in average a 36.8% wider dynamic range with much better working point symmetry. Simulations with strain signals also demonstrate that, compared to the 3 dB point, the average error at the inflection point can be significantly reduced to only 27.7%. As shown in this work, by a simple shift of the working point from the 3 dB to the inflection point, slope-assisted dynamic sensing can be well enhanced.
KEYWORDS: Signal detection, Electronic filtering, Linear filtering, Signal to noise ratio, Sensors, Radio optics, Interference (communication), Fiber Bragg gratings, Denoising
This paper presents and experimentally demonstrates a new approach for the noise reduction and measurement accuracy enhancement in Brillouin optical time domain analyzers (BOTDA) by applying low pass filtering to the detected radio frequency (RF) signal. The simulation and experimental results indicate that the noise level of the BOTDA traces is reduced by using RF filtering. The corresponding measurement accuracy improvement depends on the cut-off frequency of the employed low pass filter. RF filtering is more efficient than other post-processing methods since it overcomes the long processing time. However, the results also imply that RF filters with too low bandwidths distort the trace signals and lead to detection errors.
In this paper, a novel method of precise dispersion measurement is proposed by exploiting the high sensitivity of the notch frequency shift and stopband rejection in microwave photonic notch filters (MPNF) based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in optical fibers. The MPNF principle is based on an amplitude unbalance and π phaseshift between two probe wave sidebands. In case of an SBS interaction on one of the sidebands, the unbalance is eliminated. Thus, the notch filter will be formed at a specific notch frequency by the signal cancellation at the receiver. A slight dispersion mismatch leads to a notch frequency shift and a significant reduction of the notch suppression. Due to the linear dependence of the notch frequency shift on the dispersion in the vicinity of proper compensation value, even two measurements are sufficient for a precise dispersion determination.
Due to the Kramers-Kronig relations, the gain-loss transfer function of a medium is connected to its dispersion behavior. A possibility to artificially generate gains and losses in a medium is the nonlinear effect of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). The special advantage of SBS is that it offers a very narrow linewidth, which additionally can be broadened and adapted to the application by a modulation of the SBS pump wave, it is the nonlinear effect with the smallest threshold and optical fibers or integrated chips can be used as the nonlinear medium. Thus, the SBS offers the possibility to artificially engineer the dispersion of a medium, which can be used for many possible applications in engineering and science. Here, after a brief discussion of dispersion engineering with SBS we will emphasize two applications of this kind of dispersion engineering for additional noise-free microwave filters and the storage of light.
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