Low-noise and high-gain Brillouin optical amplifier for narrowband active optical filtering based on a pump-to-signal optoelectronic tracking

We implement and characterize an optical narrowband amplifier based on stimulated Brillouin scattering with pump-to-signal relative frequency fluctuations overcome thanks to an active pump tracking. We achieve a precise characterization of this amplifier in terms of gain and noise degradation (noise figure). The performances of this stable selective amplification are compared to those of a conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifier in order to highlight the interest of the Brillouin amplification solution for active narrow optical filtering with a bandpass of 10 MHz. Thanks to the simple optoelectronic pump-to-signal tracking, the Brillouin active filter appears as a stable and reliable solution for narrowband optical processing in the coherent optical communication context and optical sensor applications. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America