A theoretical treatment of two approaches to SBS mitigation with two-tone amplification

A technique that employs two seed signals for the purpose of mitigating stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effects in narrow-linewidth Yb-doped fiber amplifiers is investigated theoretically by constructing a self-consistent model that incorporates the laser gain, SBS, and four-wave mixing (FWM). The model reduces to solving a two-point boundary problem consisting of an 8x8 system of coupled nonlinear differential equations. Optimal operating conditions are determined by examining the interplay between the wavelength separation and power ratio of the two seeds. Two variants of this 'two-tone' amplification are considered. In one case the wavelength separation is precisely twice the Brillouin shift, while the other case considers a greater wavelength separation. For the former case, a two-fold increase in total output power over a broad range of seed power ratios centered about a ratio of approximately 2 is obtained, but with fairly large FWM. For the latter case, this model predicts an approximately 100% increase in output power (at SBS threshold with no signs of FWM) for a 'two-tone' amplifier with seed signals at 1064nm and 1068nm, compared to a conventional fiber amplifier with a single 1068nm seed. More significantly for this case, it is found that at a wavelength separation greater than 10nm, it is possible to appreciably enhance the power output of one of the laser frequencies. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.