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Intense Brillouin amplification in gas using hollow-core waveguides

Nature Photonics volume 14, pages 700–708 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Among all the nonlinear effects stimulated Brillouin scattering offers the highest gain in solid materials and has demonstrated advanced photonics functionalities in waveguides. The large compressibility of gases suggests that stimulated Brillouin scattering may gain in efficiency with respect to condensed materials. Here, by using a gas-filled hollow-core fibre at high pressure, we achieve a strong Brillouin amplification per unit length, exceeding by six times the gain observed in fibres with a solid silica core. This large amplification benefits from a higher molecular density and a lower acoustic attenuation at higher pressure, combined with a tight light confinement. Using this approach, we demonstrate the capability to perform large optical amplifications in hollow-core waveguides. The implementations of a low-threshold gas Brillouin fibre laser and a high-performance distributed temperature sensor, intrinsically free of strain cross-sensitivity, illustrate the potential for hollow-core fibres, paving the way to their integration into lasing, sensing and signal processing.

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Fig. 1: Principle of the generation of SBS in gas-filled HCFs.
Fig. 2: Experimental gains in gas by SBS.
Fig. 3: Amplification of the probe wave as a function of the pump power in the HCF.
Fig. 4: Gas Brillouin lasing.
Fig. 5: Distributed temperature sensing with no strain cross-sensitivity.
Fig. 6: Experimental Brillouin gain spectra for the HCF filled with different types of gas.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3934070). All other data used in this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The simulation code of this study is available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3934070).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the Swiss National Foundation under grant agreement numbers 178895 and 159897. We thank M. Pang from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics for discussions, and F. Yun, S. Sebastian and B. Pickford for the revision of this manuscript.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Fan Yang, Flavien Gyger.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Group for Fibre Optics, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Fan Yang, Flavien Gyger & Luc Thévenaz

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Contributions

L.T. initiated the idea of exploiting SBS in gases through HCFs. F.Y. conceived the ideas of intense Brillouin amplification and Brillouin fibre lasing by using pressurized gas in HCFs. L.T. conceived the strain-insensitive sensing idea. F.Y. and F.G. fabricated the HCF gas cell, designed the measurement set-ups, performed the experiments, simulated the acoustic and optical modes, and theoretically analysed the gain coefficient. F.G. explained the acoustic attenuation in relation to the gas pressure and simulated the impact of strain on the gas-filled HCF. F.Y., F.G. and L.T. wrote the manuscript. L.T. supervised this work.

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Correspondence to Fan Yang or Luc Thévenaz.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–10, Discussion and Tables 1–4.

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Yang, F., Gyger, F. & Thévenaz, L. Intense Brillouin amplification in gas using hollow-core waveguides. Nat. Photonics 14, 700–708 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-0676-z

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