Stimulated Brillouin scattering for improvement of microwave fibre-optic link efficiency

Stimulated Brillouin scattering is used to increase the modulation depth of a weakly-modulated optical signal by rejecting the forward travelling carrier power. For an input power of eight times the stimulated Brillouin threshold, an improvement of 8 dB in link loss from 0.1 to 20 GHz is achieved.