Stimulated Brillouin Scattering Characterization and Slow Light Generation Technique in Modern Optical Fibres

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a recent technique developed to generate slow light in optical fibres. It is the simplest and most applicable method of slow light production. In this paper a high power laser pump was used to provide the Brillouin gain of a low power signal of -10 dBm. Three single mode fibres namely, standard fibre (STD), large area fibre (LA) and reduced slope fibre (RS), all of different optical characteristics were used. Variation of signal delay with pump power and fibre length in SBS slow light was studied. Stokes power was observed to increase with fibre length while signal delay was realized for pump power between 27 dBm and 30 dBm in the three fibres used. A maximum delay of 7.6 ps, 4.1 ps and 3.5 ps was obtained for STD, LA and RS fibres respectively. It was also noted that signal delay increased with increase in fibre length. This work is extremely valuable in providing modern optical fibre transmission networks with a more reliable and highly sensitive techniques for network monitoring applications such as optical buffers, optical synchronizers and optical equalizers. Keywords— SBS, slow light, optical fibre.