title: Synthetic spectrum approach for Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry.
abstract: We propose a novel method to improve the spatial resolution of Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR), referred to as synthetic BOTDR (S-BOTDR), and experimentally verify the resolution improvements. Due to the uncertainty relation between position and frequency, the spatial resolution of a conventional BOTDR system has been limited to about one meter. In S-BOTDR, a synthetic spectrum is obtained by combining four Brillouin spectrums measured with different composite pump lights and different composite low-pass filters. We mathematically show that the resolution limit, in principle, for conventional BOTDR can be surpassed by S-BOTDR and experimentally prove that S-BOTDR attained a 10-cm spatial resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this has never been achieved or reported.
authors.affiliation: Office for University-Industry Collaboration, Osaka University, Yamadaoka 2-8, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. nishiguchi@mls.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Ken'ichi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nishiguchi
authors.affiliation: Neubrex Co., Ltd., Sakaemachi-dori 1-1-24, Kobe 650-0023, Japan. Li-z@neubrex.jp.
authors.forename: Che-Hsien
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Neubrex Co., Ltd., Sakaemachi-dori 1-1-24, Kobe 650-0023, Japan. guzik@neubrex.jp.
authors.forename: Artur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Guzik
authors.affiliation: Neubrex Co., Ltd., Sakaemachi-dori 1-1-24, Kobe 650-0023, Japan. kishida@neubrex.jp.
authors.forename: Kinzo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kishida