Experimental and Numerical Study on Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in a Spun Optical Fiber

This paper presents a numerical and experimental investigation of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a highly birefringent spun optical fiber. When subjected to bending, the variation in the state-of-polarization (SOP) of the pump and probe waves induces a periodic oscillation of the Brillouin gain, with a period equal to the elliptical birefringence of the fiber. The experiments were corroborated by numerical simulations, combining the coupled equations governing the SOP evolution in bent spun fibers, with a scalar SBS model valid for Brillouin optical frequency-domain analysis (BOFDA) sensors.