Optimization and experimental verification of synthetic Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry

Abstract

In a previous paper, we proposed synthetic Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (S-BOTDR) to overcome the resolution limit of a conventional BOTDR.We obtained this method's synthetic spectrum by combining the spectrums measured with different composite pump pulses and different composite low-pass filters. In this paper, we solve an optimization problem that minimizes the fluctuation of the synthetic spectrum and experimentally prove that 10-cm spatial resolution, which is much smaller than the conventional BOTDR limit, was attained by the optimal S-BOTDR.