200 km fiber-loop Brillouin distributed fiber sensor using bipolar Golay codes and a three-tone probe

Aiming at taking full advantage of bipolar codes, a method using a three-tone probe is proposed to alleviate the probe power limitation imposed by pump depletion in Golay-coded Brillouin distributed fiber sensors. Experimental results validate the technique, which reduces significantly the measurement distortions induced by the gain/loss unbalance resulting from pump depletion/amplification. The method supports a probe power increment of more than 12.5 dB, resulting in low-uncertainty measurements (< 0.9 MHz) at a real 100 km distance, using a 200 km-long fiber loop and 2 m spatial resolution. The method is evaluated with a record figure-of-merit of 380’000.