Stimulated Brillouin Scattering based Optical Signal Processing for Fiber-optic Communications and Sensing

Optical signal processing based on fiber nonlinearities plays an important role in both fiber-optic communications and sensing. Among various nonlinear effects, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in optical fibers has been widely employed not only in processing of high-speed communication signals, but also in constructing fiber-optic sensors. This thesis investigates new techniques of optical signal processing based on SBS for fiber-optic communications and sensing.;In the recent years, slow light has attracted considerable interest because of its numerous applications, in realizing variable true time delay and in optical information processing. Among various slow light mechanisms, the SBS based slow light shows great potential in all-optical signal processing due to the advantages of room-temperature operation and device compatibility with existing fiber systems. However, owing to the tight requirement of spectral alignment between the SBS pump and the signal, most of the published works are for the case where one SBS pump is used to delay a single channel. Hence, only one delayed channel is obtained. In this thesis, we demonstrate a technique to simultaneously generate multiple delayed signals through four-wave mixing (FWM) wavelength multicasting in a single-pump stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) based slow light system. The signal delay is achieved with a SBS pump while at the same time the delay is transferred to six other channels by three FWM pumps employed for wavelength multicasting. This slow light multicasting technique may find applications in parallel optical information processing such as simultaneous multichannel synchronization and time division multiplexing.;Fiber-optic sensor techniques provide a promising approach for structure health monitoring, especially the temperature and strain monitoring. The technique based on Brillouin scattering has attracted much interest in the past two decades because Brillouin fiber sensors offer advantages of high resolution, long distance sensing, and large sensing range. In the thesis, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a new method for temperature/strain sensing using stimulated Brillouin scattering based slow light. The approach relies on temperature/strain dependence of the Brillouin frequency shift in a fiber, hence the time delay of an input probe pulse. By measuring the delay, temperature/strain sensing can be realized. We achieve temperature measurement for both a 100 m single mode fiber (SMF) and a 2 m SMF. Distributed temperature/strain sensing has been demonstrated later. The temperature/strain of a particular fiber section can be monitored by setting an appropriate relative delay between the pump and probe pulses. By controlling the relative delay, we have achieved distributed profiling of the temperature/strain along the whole sensing fiber. Compared to conventional Brillouin fiber sensors, our scheme has the merits of more straightforward implementation, fast response and potential of real-time monitoring.;Wavelength conversion plays an important role in wavelength routing and switching. Among various schemes for wavelength conversion, the one based on FWM is superior as it offers advantages in being transparent to modulation formats, bit-rates, and communication protocols. However, significant FWM can occur only if the phase velocities of the interplaying waves are matched. The matching condition can hardly be satisfied over a wide spectral range and hence the conversion bandwidth is often limited. In this thesis, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an approach to dynamically control the FWM phase matching condition by using gain-transparent SBS. By introducing self-compensation of optical gain/loss with SBS pump and Stokes waves, the FWM phase matching condition can be flexibly controlled through SBS induced refractive index change without affecting the initial parameters of the FWM. The gain-transparent scheme is employed to enlarge the degenerate FWM conversion bandwidth, enhance the performance in wavelength conversion of communication signals, all-optically manipulate non-degenerate FWM conversion bandwidth, achieve both polarization-insensitive and wideband operation in a dual orthogonal pump wavelength converter, and extend the maximum optical delay of a delay line based on FWM wavelength conversion and dispersion.;Low noise and broadband amplification are possible by using optical parametric processes. Although fiber-optic parametric amplifier (FOPA) can provide gain as high as 70 dB, its operation is often confined by phase mismatch of the interplaying fields. In this thesis, we apply gain-transparent SBS to a FOPA and dynamically control its gain profile. The conventional "M" shape gain profile can be dynamically changed. Flattening of the gain profile to within 0.1 dB variation has been achieved.