Determination and Analysis of Line-Shape Induced Enhancement of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Noise Broadened, Narrow Linewidth, High Power Fiber Lasers

We investigate the origin of line-shape induced enhancement of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in narrow linewidth, noise broadened, high-power fiber lasers. A polarization-maintaining seed laser with continuously tunable linewidth (single frequency to >10 GHz), based on white noise modulation was developed for this study. With increasing linewidths, a substantial difference in SBS thresholds was observed depending on the end termination utilized. This observation can be explained by the line-broadened source, having significant power in the Stokes frequency at larger linewidths, seeding the SBS process. Here, SBS threshold for the system terminated with an anti-reflection coated delivery cable is compared with a simple angle cleaved end termination. The influence of end termination on SBS threshold becomes significant with increased linewidths, showing >20% difference in output power between the two cases at similar to 10 GHz linewidth. The experiments are complemented by simulations, analyzing relative contributions of Rayleigh scattering and fiber end-facet reflections to SBS. At larger linewidths, due to substantial overlap between laser line-shape and SBS Stokes, with low end-facet reflectivity, Rayleigh is the dominant mechanism, which gives way to end-facet reflections with increasing reflectivity. The Rayleigh contribution is negligible at smaller linewidths, and end-facet reflectivity has a weaker influence than with larger linewidths.