Effect of stimulated Brillouin scattering on the gain saturation of distributed fiber Raman amplifier and its suppression by phase modulation

For distributed fiber Raman amplifiers（DFRAs）, stimulated Brillouin scattering（SBS） can deplete the pump once occurring and consequently generate gain saturation. On the basis of such a theory, theoretical gain saturation powers in DFRAs with various pump schemes are obtained by calculating SBS thresholds in them, and the experimental results show that they are in excellent agreement with the calculation results. The saturation power of the DFRA with a 300 m W forward pump is as low as 0 d Bm, which needs to be enhanced by phase modulation, and the effect is quantitatively studied. A simple model taking both modulation frequency and index into consideration is presented by introducing a correction factor to evaluate the effect of phase modulation on the enhancement of saturation power. Experimentally, it is shown that such a correction factor decreases as the modulation frequency increases and approaches zero when the modulation frequency becomes high enough. In particular, a phase modulation with a modulation frequency of 100 MHz and a modulation index of 1.380 can enhance the saturation power by 4.44 d B, and the correction factor is 0.25 d B, in which the modulation frequency is high enough. Additionally, the factor is 1.767 d B for the modulation frequency of 25 MHz. On this basis,phase modulations with various indexes and a fixed frequency of 25 MHz are adopted to verify the modified model, and the results are positive. To obtain the highest gain saturation power, the model is referable. The research results provide a guide for the design of practical DFRAs.

A new method for measuring the threshold of stimulated Brillouin scattering

A new method for measuring the threshold of stimulated Brillouin scattering （SBS） based on the generation location of a Stokes beam is proposed for the first time to our knowledge. The length of the medium cell is selected to be longer than the free gain length of pump pulses in the Brillouin medium. The reflected light from a certain mirror in front of the medium cell is chosen as the reference beam, and the SBS threshold is measured by the ＂jump＂ of the delay between the Stokes beam and the reference beam. An 8-ns Q-switched single-longitudinal-mode pulse is used as the pump and the typical SBS medium FC-72 is selected as the nonlinear medium in our experiment. The SBS threshold intensity is measured to be 173-178 mW/cm2, which is consistent with existing results measured with the transmitted energy limiting method.