A Simple Technique for Reducing Pump Depletion in Long-Range Distributed Brillouin Fiber Sensors

We present a technical solution, capable of alleviating the problem of pump depletion in a long-range Brillouin distributed fiber sensor. This solution takes advantage of the presence of two sidebands in the probe wave to generate a dual gain-loss Brillouin interaction, giving rise to reduced pump depletion. Experimental results, carried out by using a Brillouin optical frequency-domain analysis configuration, demonstrated the improvement offered by the gain-loss technique.