Phase-noise-compensated optical frequency domain reflectometry with measurement range beyond laser coherence length realized using concatenative reference method

A novel type of optical frequency domain reflectometry with a measurement range much longer than the laser coherence length is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. To reduce the influence of laser phase noise, the measurement signal is compensated by using reference signals generated from a single auxiliary interferometer supported by a newly proposed compensation process. The compensation is accomplished numerically with a computer for each section of the delay fiber length in an auxiliary interferometer after only one data acquisition. By using the proposed technique, it is confirmed experimentally that the laser phase noise is well compensated even beyond the coherence length. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.