Brillouin gain bandwidth reduction in Brillouin optical time domain analyzers

This paper proposes a novel method based on differential pi-phase-shift long-pulse-width pair to narrow the Brillouin gain spectrum for improving the frequency accuracy in Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) system. This is the first approach to reduce the bandwidth of Brillouin gain spectrum for distributed sensing to the best of our knowledge. The temporal and spectral Brillouin responses for the proposal are analytically solved, and the key parameters such as pulse width and the length of pi-phase-shift pulse section are investigated. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposal could achieve 17 MHz Brillouin gain spectrum bandwidth and a fixed spatial resolution of 2.5 m simultaneously, without signal-to-noise ratio penalty. This Brillouin gain spectrum is 3 times narrower than that obtained using standard single-pulse based BOTDA method with same spatial resolution, resulting in root 3 times frequency accuracy improvement. Furthermore, such a significantly narrowed Brillouin gain spectrum provides more tolerance to the small temperature change when hot spots are introduced, giving rise to the sharper rising/falling edge of the Brillouin frequency shift profile along the sensing fiber. This way, more precise temperature/strain measurement can be obtained. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America