Transient behaviour of fibre optic Brillouin ring lasers

Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is the dominant non-linearity in silica optical fibres. In high­finesse all-fibre ring resonators with fibre lengths of the order of 10 m stimulated Brillouin scattering can be observed at input power levels in the range of 10 to 100 μW [1]. Above pump threshold fibre optic ring resonators show intensive laser oscillation at the Stokes wavelength and therefore are called Brillouin ring lasers (BRL). An important application of Brillouin ring lasers is the all-fibre optic ring laser gyro [2].