CHARACTERIZATION OF STIMULATED BRILLOUIN SCATTERING AND Bi-EDFA AS A CONVENTIONAL BRILLOUIN FIBER LASER

Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) is one of the nonlinear process that can occur in optical fiber if the input power at low level [1,2]. It is a natural scattering process associate to the propagation of light in a medium. Due to the interaction of light with the propagation medium, different scattering components are generated: Rayleigh, Brillouin and Raman component. The resulting scattered optical wave as a result called as stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a Doppler shifted in a frequency [3]. The SBS can produce gain in an optical fiber that can be used to amplify a weak signal which the frequency is shift from the pump frequency which called Brillouin shift. Such amplifier were studied since 1980s [1]. A lasing characterization of a Brillouin/erbium fiber laser (BEFL) is experimentally discussed in this chapter. In the BEFL, an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) is incorporated into the Brillouin laser resonator to enhance small Brillouin gain, which makes the configuration of the Brillouin laser resonator easy and flexible. EDFA are most familiar because of the operating wavelength region is near 1550nm [4]. The gain spectrum depends on the pumping scheme as well as on the presence of other dopants within the fiber core. The characteristics of EDFA such as gain and noise figure