Brillouin optical time-domain analysis at a high sampling rate (invited)

In the modern industry, a distributed ultra-fast measurement for obtaining environment information (e.g. strain and temperature) is required. Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA), one of widely used optical fiber sensing, is usually employed to measure the distributed Brillouin frequency shift over fiber under test via a time-consuming frequency-sweeping process which limits the sampling rate of BOTDA. Several fast BOTDA schemes proposed by our team are summarised and are classified into three categories: frequency-agile technique, slope-assisted methods and optical chirp chain technique.