Numerical simulation of noise in pulsed Brillouin scattering

Abstract

We present a numerical method for modeling noise in stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). The model applies to dynamic cases such as optical pulses and accounts for both thermal noise and phase noise from the input lasers. Using this model, we compute the statistical properties of the optical and acoustic power in the pulsed spontaneous and stimulated Brillouin cases, and investigate the effects of gain and pulse width on noise levels. We find that thermal noise plays an important role in the statistical properties of the fields and that laser phase noise impacts the SBS interaction when the laser coherence time is close to the time scale of the optical pulses. This algorithm is applicable to arbitrary waveguide geometries and material properties and, thus, presents a versatile way of performing noise-based SBS numerical simulations, which are important in signal processing, sensing, microwave photonics, and opto-acoustic memory storage.