Impact of self phase modulation on the performance of Brillouin distributed fibre sensors
S. F. Mafang, EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland); F. Rodríguez, S. M. López, Institute of Applied Physics (Spain); M. González Herráez, University of Alcalá (Spain); L. Thévenaz, EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland)
The spectral broadening of the pump pulse through self phase modulation in a time domain distributed Brillouin sensor is demonstrated to have a non-negligible detrimental effect, leading to a doubling of the effective gain linewidth after some 20 km in standard conditions. The theoretical modeling is fully confirmed by experimental results.
