Coherent frequency-modulated continuous wave reflectometry for measuring stationary Brillouin grating induced under uniform pumping by counterpropagating nonmodulated light waves.

We describe theoretically and experimentally how valuable information on the distributed Brillouin spectra of an optical waveguide is derived from the stationary Brillouin grating measurement under uniform pumping over the waveguide by using the coherent frequency-modulated continuous wave reflectometry. We upconvert the frequencies of the probe and pumping light waves by the Brillouin frequency with one modulator and detect the Stokes light in the same way that we detect the Fresnel and Rayleigh backreflections in the fiber. The intrinsic coherent spike is reduced by using the lock-in detection and the least squares method to reveal the distributed Brillouin spectra of a short optical fiber consisting of two different fibers spliced together.