Scanning-free BOTDA based on ultra-fine digital optical frequency comb.

We realize a scanning-free Brillouin optical time domain analyzer (BOTDA) based on an ultra-fine digital optical frequency comb (DOFC) with 1.95MHz frequency spacing and 2GHz bandwidth. The DOFC can be used to reconstruct the Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS) and locate the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) without frequency scanning and thus can improve the measurement speed about 100 times compared with the conventional BOTDA. This scanning-free BOTDA scheme has also been demonstrated experimentally with 51.2m spatial resolution over 10km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) and with resolution of 1.5°C for temperature and 43.3με for strain measurement respectively.