Influence of laser phase noise on Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Analysis sensors

This paper presents a numerical study of the phase noise from the laser in Brillouin Optical Time-Domain analysis (BOTDA) sensors. Due to laser phase noise, the phase shift cumulated by pump and probe beams during interaction in a generic fiber position is a stochastic variable, with zero mean and variance increasing with pulse duration. For negligibly small pulse leakage, the induced noise is independent of fiber length; otherwise, it increases with fiber length as long as the laser coherence length is longer than fiber.