Raman-assistance (RA) has become a promising technique to enhance the sensing range of standard Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) fiber sensors due to its ability to amplify in a distributed way all the interacting signals within the fiber. Unfortunately, Raman amplification introduces a great amount of Relative Intensity Noise (RIN) to the detected low-frequency probe wave. This RIN transfer problem has been widely identified as a major limitation in RABOTDA. In Vector Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (VBOTDA) the detected signal is transferred to a highfrequency carrier where the Raman RIN transfer turns out to be much less harmful. In this work we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, Raman-assistance in a VBOTDA. Our results show significant reduction of the RIN transfer effect in RA-VBOTDA compared to standard RA-BOTDA, making this type of scheme particularly interesting for long range distributed sensing.

Date Published: 20 May 2013
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 8794, Fifth European Workshop on Optical Fibre Sensors, 87943A (20 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2025871

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8794:
Fifth European Workshop on Optical Fibre Sensors
Leszek R. Jaroszewicz, Editor(s)