Highly sensitive dispersion map extraction from highly nonlinear fibers using BOTDA probing of parametric amplification

摘要

The performance of devices based on highly nonlinear fibers (HNLF) can be drastically impeded by even tiny fluctuations of the zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) along the fiber. Being able to measure ZDW fluctuations along an HNLF is therefore essential for the design of efficient nonlinear optics based devices such as fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPA), regenerators and limiters. Different schemes using complex distributed sensing of localized nonlinear interactions have been used in order to derive the ZDW fluctuations along the fiber [1-2]. In [3], the distributed gain of a pulsed pump FOPA along an HNLF was measured using a Brillouin Optical-Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) based technique. In this paper, by improving the experimental scheme, we have been able to measure the FOPA gain along the fiber with low noise, which enabled us to derive ZDW fluctuations as low as 0.02 nm along HNLFs with 2 meters longitudinal resolution.