Stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugating properties of long multimode optical fibers

This paper describes and characterizes a detailed experiment that proves the phase conjugating properties of stimulated Brillouin scattering in multimode fibers (km of length), a problem still in debate in the literature, by studying the random aberrations correction abilities of this nonlinear interaction. Detailed qualitative and quantitative evaluation of aberration correction, by using the M2 beam propagation ratio as a criterion to assess beam quality of the beams, proves the phase conjugation via SBS in long MM fibers. A new parameter to characterize the efficiency of the SBS phase conjugation process is proposed and conditions to obtain a complete healing of distortions (complete phase conjugation) are discussed.