Brillouin gain spectrum manipulation using multifrequency pump and probe for slope-assisted BOTDA with wider dynamic range

Abstract We propose slope-assisted Brillouin optical time domain analysis (SA-BOTDA) with virtual Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS) generated by a multifrequency pump and probe. The virtual BGS having a wide linear slope region of 100 MHz is easily generated by employing a time-to-space spectral shaping technique that has been originally developed for generating short optical pulses. We demonstrate the distribution of virtual BGS realized by using five spectral components of pump and probe.