Transfer characteristics of Brillouin fibre amplifiers for use in self-homodyne coherent optical transmission systems

Abstract

We present, for the first time, the basic input-output characteristics of a Brillouin fibre amplifier, and show that these are in good agreement with the first experimental results reported recently by other workers on a novel and potentially very important application of Brillouin amplification in a coherent optical fibre transmission system. For this type of application, theoretical results are also presented on the optical pump power dependence of the amplifier gain per unit optical pump power.