Stimulated Brillouin scattering gain bandwidth reduction and applications in microwave photonics and optical signal processing

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is one of the most dominant nonlinear effects in standard singlemode fibers and its unique spectral characteristics, especially the narrow bandwidth, enable many different applications. Most of the applications would benefit from a narrower bandwidth. Different methods for the bandwidth reduction of SBS in optical fibers are presented and discussed. A bandwidth reduction down to 17% of the natural gain can be achieved by the superposition of the gain with two losses or the utilization of a multistage system. Furthermore, applications in the field of microwave photonics and optical signal processing like high-resolution spectroscopy of communication signals, the storage of optical data packets as well as the processing of frequency combs including generation of millimeter waves and ideal sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses are presented. (C) 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)