Abstract

Raman-assistance (RA) has become a promising technique to enhance the sensing range of standard Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) fiber sensors due to its ability to amplify in a distributed way all the interacting signals within the fiber. Unfortunately, Raman amplification introduces a great amount of Relative Intensity Noise (RIN) to the detected low-frequency probe wave. This RIN transfer problem has been widely identified as a major limitation in RA-BOTDA. In Vector Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (VBOTDA) the detected signal is transferred to a high-frequency carrier where the Raman RIN transfer turns out to be much less harmful. In this work we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, Raman-assistance in a VBOTDA. Our results show significant reduction of the RIN transfer effect in RA-VBOTDA compared to standard RA-BOTDA, making this type of scheme particularly interesting for long range distributed sensing.