Demonstration of Distributed Strain Sensing With the Use of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering-Based Slow Light

We demonstrate a distributed fiber-optic strain sensing scheme by measuring the delay time associated with stimulated Brillouin scattering-based slow light. The strain in any particular fiber section can be monitored by setting the counterpropagating pump and probe pulses to cross over in the region and recording the slow light delay. By scanning the crossover point along the sensing fiber, we have achieved distributed strain measurement. This scheme is simple to implement while offering a relatively high strain resolution of 13 mu epsilon and a spatial resolution of 15 m.