Design and performance evaluation of narrowband rectangular optical filter based on stimulated Brillouin scattering in fiber

We propose a rectangular optical filter based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in fiber with tunable bandwidth from 50 MHz to 4 GHz at 15-MHz tuning resolution. The steep-edged rectangular shape of the filter is precisely controlled utilizing digital feedback compensation of the multi-tone pump light. The passband ripple is \(\sim \)1 dB by nonlinearity management of the pump light and using the fiber with a single Brillouin peak. The filter selectivity is improved to more than 40 dB by using pump-splitting dual-stage configuration. We analyze the noise performance of the proposed SBS filter and demonstrate a sub-band extraction of a multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. Furthermore, we validate the amplification performance with different gains for OFDM signal, which shows the potential capability of the filter in the fields of optical signal processing.