Abstract

Phase modulation is currently applied on pump laser beams propagating in thick optical elements to avoid optical damage induced by Brillouin backscattering. The experimental measurements show that adding a 2 GHz amplitude modulation to such a phase-modulated laser beam can compromise this optical preservation by increasing the Brillouin backscattering signal. These results are confirmed and explained with a theoretical analysis, developed in the perturbative regime, and with the numerical results obtained by solving three-wave coupling equations. Particularly, we show that when the frequency of the amplitude modulation is a harmonic of the phase modulation frequency, the Brillouin gain value is increased and can exceed the one obtained without amplitude modulation.

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