Narrow Spectral Response of a Brillouin Amplifier transmission channel

Abstract

We investigate the spectral response of a Brillouin amplifier in the frequency regime within the SBS bandwidth. This is done by amplitude modulating the pump with a low frequency, and therefore, unlike previous studies, the spectrum of the modulated pump is, in all cases, smaller than the SBS bandwidth. We show both theoretically and experimentally that unlike phase modulation, which was reported in the literature, the amplitude modulation increases the Brillouin amplifier gain, and that this effect has a very narrow bandwidth. Only modulation frequencies that are lower than a certain cut-off frequency increase the gain. This cut-off frequency is inversely proportional to the fiber's length, and can therefore be arbitrarily small.