Enhancing the backscattering efficiency of an optical fiber over a broad wavelength range without increasing its losses is indeed a difficult - yet possible - task. Dr. Ali Masoudi et al. from the University of Southampton show in this paper that by continuously inscribing discrete, well-engineered point reflectors along a conventional optical fiber, it is possible to enhance its backscattering coefficient by several orders of magnitude. This enhancement can be used either to improve the power budget or to increase the spatial resolution of any distributed sensing scheme based on fiber backscattering. Compared to other methods published in the literature, the key advantage of this one is that the improvement in backscatter efficiency is achieved over a broad wavelength range (unlike grating-based schemes), and with minor impact on the fiber attenuation (unlike doping-based methods). Although the production speed of such enhanced-backscatter fiber is still slow, it might become in the future a more flexible alternative to existing commercial options which only operate over a narrow wavelength range.

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