Bandwidth-tunable narrowband rectangular optical filter based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fiber.

We propose a rectangular optical filter based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in optical fiber with bandwidth tuning from 50 MHz to 4 GHz at less than 15-MHz resolution. The rectangular shape of the filter is precisely achieved utilizing digital feedback control of the comb-like pump spectral lines. The passband ripple is suppressed to ~1 dB by mitigating the nonlinearity influences of the comb-like pump lines generated in electrical and optical components and fibers. Moreover a fiber with a single Brillouin peak is employed to further reduce the in-band ripple and the out-of-band SBS gain at the same time. Finally, we analyze the noise performance of the filter at different bandwidth cases and demonstrate the system performance of the proposed filter with 2.1-GHz bandwidth and 19-dB gain by amplifying a 2-GHz orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) signal with quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) and 16-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16-QAM) on each subscriber.