Abstract:The polarization properties of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) amplification or attenuation in standard single-mode fibers are examined through vectorial analysis, simulation and experiment. Vector propagation equations for the signal wave, incorporating SBS and birefringence, are derived and analyzed in both the Jones and Stokes spaces. The analysis shows that in the undepleted pump regime, the fiber may be regarded as a polarization-dependent gain (or loss) medium, having two orthogonal input SOPs, and corresponding two orthogonal output SOPs, for the signal, which, respectively, provide the signal with maximum and minimum SBS amplification (or attenuation). Under high Brillouin gain conditions and excluding zero-probability cases, the output SOP of arbitrarily polarized input signals, would tend to converge towards that of maximum SBS gain. In the case of high SBS attenuation the output SOP of an arbitrarily polarized signal would approach the output SOP corresponding to minimum attenuation. It is found that for a wide range of practical pump powers ( mW 100 ≤ ) and for sufficiently long fibers with typical SBS and birefringence parameters, the signal aligned for maximum SBS interaction will enter/emerge from the fiber with its electric field closely tracing the same ellipse in space as that of the pump at the corresponding side of the fiber, albeit with the opposite sense of rotation. The analytic predictions are experimentally demonstrated for both Stokes (amplification) and anti-Stokes (attenuation) signals.

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Judicious chirping of a directly modulated pump laser is used to broaden the intrinsic linewidth of stimulated Brillouin scattering in an optical fiber. The modulation waveform is designed to obtain a spectrum with sharp edges, resulting in phase gradients stronger that those obtained for random pump modulation. The gain and phase frequency response of the slow light process are measured by a vector network analyzer, and the delays obtained for our tailored modulation are compared with the case of random direct modulation. For equal pump powers and gain bandwidths (FWHM), the tailored modulation waveform introduces 30-40% longer delays. Using this technique, pseudo random bit sequences of 5 Gb/s were successfully delayed by up to 120 ps (BER<10(-5)) and 80 ps (BER<10(-9)).

In distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) an optical fiber is transformed into an array of thousands of "virtual microphones." Most current DAS methodologies are based on coherent interference of Rayleigh backscattered light and thus are prone to signal fading. Hence, the sensitivities of the "microphones" fluctuate randomly along the fiber. Therefore, specifying the sensitivity of DAS without considering its random nature is incomplete and of limited value. In this Letter, the statistical properties of DAS SNR and DAS sensitivity are studied in detail for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. It is shown that the mean dynamic DAS SNR is proportional to the SNR obtained in a single measurement of the fiber's "static" backscatter profile and, in turn, to the energy of the interrogation pulse. Finally, the minimum input signal, which produces a specified mean DAS SNR, is proposed as a new figure of merit for the characterization of system performances and for comparison between the sensitivities of different DAS modalities.

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) has become a favorable underlying mechanism in many demonstrations of all-optical variable delay in standard fibers, often referred to as slow and fast light. Over 100 journal papers and numerous conference sessions have been dedicated to SBS slow light since 2005. In this paper, recent research in this area is reviewed. Following a short introduction to the topic, several specific trends in contemporary work are highlighted: the optimization of the SBS pump spectrum for extended slow light delay and reduced pulse distortion; SBS slow light demonstrations in nonstandard, highly nonlinear fibers; applications of SBS slow light to the delay of analog waveforms; and the role of polarization. Finally, a brief concluding perspective is provided.

Thermal Diffusion Flowmetry (TDF) (also called Heat Clearance Method or Thermal Clearance Method) is a longstanding technique for measuring blood flow or blood perfusion in living tissues. Typically, temperature transients and/or gradients are induced in a volume of interest and the temporal and/or spatial temperature variations which follow are measured and used for calculation of the flow. In this work a new method for implementing TDF is studied theoretically and experimentally. The heat deposition which is required for TDF is implemented photothermally (PT) and the measurement of the induced temperature variations is done by photoacoustic (PA) thermometry. Both excitation light beams (the PT and the PA) are produced by directly modulated 830 nm laser diodes and are conveniently delivered to the volume under test by the same optical fiber. The method was tested experimentally using a blood-filled phantom vessel and the results were compared with a theoretical prediction based on the heat and the photoacoustic equations. The fitting of a simplified lumped thermal model to the experimental data yielded estimated values of the blood velocity at different flow rates. By combining additional optical sources at different wavelengths it will be possible to utilize the method for non-invasive simultaneous measurement of blood flow and oxygen saturation using a single fiber probe.

In this paper a novel technique for flow measurement which is based on the photoacoustic (PA) Doppler effect is described. A significant feature of the proposed approach is that it can be implemented using tone burst optical excitation thus enabling simultaneous measurement of both velocity and position. The technique, which is based on external modulation and heterodyne detection, was experimentally demonstrated by measurement of the flow of a suspension of carbon particles in a silicon tube and successfully determined the particles mean velocity up to values of 130 mm/sec, which is about 10 times higher than previously reported PA Doppler set-ups. In the theoretical part a rigorous derivation of the PA response of a flowing medium is described and some important simplifying approximations are highlighted.

IC, and then to a PC for display. Codes were reliably read for image distances up to 120 mm, and work is continuing on enhancing the scan length and working distance.