Stimulated Brillouin scattering gain bandwidth reduction and applications in microwave photonics and optical signal processing

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is one of the most dominant nonlinear effects in standard single-mode fibers and its unique spectral characteristics, especially the narrow bandwidth, enable many different applications. Most of the applications would benefit from a narrower bandwidth. Different methods for the bandwidth reduction of SBS in optical fibers are presented and discussed. A bandwidth reduction down to 17% of the natural gain can be achieved by the superposition of the gain with two losses or the utilization of a multistage system. Furthermore, applications in the field of microwave photonics and optical signal processing like high-resolution spectroscopy of communication signals, the storage of optical data packets as well as the processing of frequency combs including generation of millimeter waves and ideal sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses are presented.