A novel and simple analytical expression to describe the Brillouin gain spectral broadening as a function of the spatial resolution in time-domain Brillouin distributed fiber sensors is deduced. The proposed model is experimentally validated using a pump-probe Brillouin sensing setup and also compared with numerical and approximate results. In addition, a compact mathematical form is presented for the peak gain reduction resulting from incomplete acoustic-wave activation in Brillouin sensors with short spatial resolution. Both mathematical expressions can be used together to quantitatively predict the impact of the spatial resolution on the signal-to-noise ratio and frequency uncertainty of the sensor.

Date Published: 23 April 2017
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 10323, 25th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors, 103239J (23 April 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2267639

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10323:
25th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors
Youngjoo Chung; Wei Jin; Byoungho Lee; John Canning; Kentaro Nakamura; Libo Yuan, Editor(s)