Abstract

In optical fiber communications the maximum transmitter power is limited by various nonlinear optical effects. When the optical spectrum is narrow as in coherent communication systems, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) occurs at the lowest power level.^1,2 To suppress the SBS effect, (1) the concatenation of fibers having a different Brillouin shift,³ and (2) the spectrum-spreading method⁴ have been proposed. In this paper we propose a new method for suppressing the SBS using optical isolator(s), and report the experiment results. The threshold power can be increased several decibels by this method, which can also be combined with other suppression methods.

© 1992 Optical Society of America