Effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors

The effect of Brillouin slow light on distributed Brillouin fiber sensors (DBFSs) is studied. We demonstrate Brillouin slow light for a 1.2 ns pulse with peak powers (PS) from 3.3 to 56.2 mW on depletion of the pump power (PP) ranging from 1.3 to 83.2 mW in conventional optical fibers (SMF-28). Experiments show that, when pump power depletion is not negligible, for a given PP the Brillouin gain and delay time of a pulse decrease when PS increases in a long (> or =10 km) sensing fiber. The optimum pump beam depletion resulting from strong interaction of the pump and the probe in the fiber provides accurate temperature and strain information at a high spatial resolution. Our study reveals that at low PP the spatial resolution error caused by the pulse delay for a DBFS with centimeter spatial resolution is less than 5% of the pulse length.