Pulsing the Probe Wave to Reduce Nonlocal Effects in Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) Sensors

We propose a simple technique that is able to mitigate nonlocal effects in Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) sensors. The technique consists in pulsing the probe wave, so that the Brillouin interaction only takes place in a portion of the fiber. A shorter interaction length reduces the nonlocal effects induced by pump depletion. The portion of fiber investigated each time can be easily scanned along the whole fiber length, so that the complete Brillouin frequency shift distribution can be retrieved by successive measurements.