title: Effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors.
abstract: The effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors (DBFSs) is studied. We demonstrate Brillouin slow light for a 1.2 ns pulse with peak powers (PS) from 3.3 to 56.2 mW on depletion of the pump power (PP) ranging from 1.3 to 83.2 mW in conventional optical fibers (SMF-28). Experiments show that, when pump power depletion is not negligible, for a given PP the Brillouin gain and delay time of a pulse decrease when PS increases in a long (> or =10 km) sensing fiber. The optimum pump beam depletion resulting from strong interaction of the pump and the probe in the fiber provides accurate temperature and strain information at a high spatial resolution. Our study reveals that at low PP the spatial resolution error caused by the pulse delay for a DBFS with centimeter spatial resolution is less than 5% of the pulse length.
authors.affiliation: Fiber Optics Group, Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. lzou@uottawa.ca
authors.forename: Lufan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.forename: Xiaoyi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Bao
authors.forename: Shiquan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Fabien
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ravet