Systematic errors induced by distortions in the pump pulse of conventional Brillouin distributed fiber sensors are thoroughly investigated. Experimental results, supported by a theoretical analysis, demonstrate that the two probe sidebands in standard Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers provide a non-zero net gain on the pump pulse, inducing severe distortions of the pump when scanning the ...

We report a high-performance 25 km Brillouin-loss-based distributed fiber sensor through optimizing system parameters. First, the Brillouin spectrum distortion and measurement error induced by the excess amplification on probe pulse are investigated, and the results indicate that a low continuous-wave pump power is essential to decrease the measurement error. Then an optimal pulse pair is deter...

The operation of a single-wavelength Brillouin-erbium fiber laser (BEFL) system with a Brillouin pump preamplified technique for different output coupling ratios in a ring cavity is experimentally demonstrated. The characteristics of Brillouin Stokes power and tunability were investigated in this research. The efficiency of the BEFL operation was obtained at an optimum output coupling ratio of ...

Stimulated Brillouin scattering is a fundamental interaction between light and travelling acoustic waves and arises primarily from electrostriction and photoelastic effects, with an interaction strength several orders of magnitude greater than that of other relevant non-linear optical processes. Here we report an experimental demonstration of Brillouin-scattering-induced transparency in a high-...

On-chip nonlinear optics is a thriving research field, which creates transformative opportunities for manipulating classical or quantum signals in small-footprint integrated devices. Since the length scales are short, nonlinear interactions need to be enhanced by exploiting materials with large nonlinearity in combination with high-Q resonators or slow-light structures. This, however, often res...

A novel BOTDA technique for distributed sensing of the Brillouin frequency in optical fibers with cm-order spatial resolution is proposed. The technique is based upon a simple modulation scheme, requiring only a single long pump pulse for acoustic excitation, and no subsequent interrogating pulse. Instead, the desired spatial mapping of the Brillouin response is extracted by taking the derivati...

Brillouin scattering property in a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (HNL-PCF) with hybrid-core structure is experimentally investigated. The HNL-PCF comprises a highly Ge-doped core surrounded by a triangularly-arranged F-doped buffer. It is experimentally shown that there exist five Brillouin resonance peaks with ~300 MHz frequency spacing in the Brillouin gain spectrum, which can be cl...

Acoustically induced inelastic light scattering, first reported in 1922 by Brillouin1, allows non-contact, direct readout of the viscoelastic properties of a material and has widely been investigated for material characterization2, structural monitoring3 and environmental sensing4. Extending the Brillouin technique from point sampling spectroscopy to imaging modality5 would open up new possibil...