Delay of Broadband Signals Using Slow Light in Stimulated Brillouin Scattering With Phase-Modulated Pump

Slow light due to stimulated Brillouin scattering in fibers is a promising technique to realize all-optical data storage and synchronization. For delaying high-speed data, we demonstrate an approach to solve the problem of narrowband Brillouin gain by phase-modulating the Brillouin pump. The bit rate of the phase-modulating signal determines the Brillouin gain bandwidth. A 1.25-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero pseudorandom binary sequence data is delayed by 520 ps with a phase-modulated pump operating at 2.5-Gb/s bit rate. We have also observed the pattern-dependent delay and distortion of the data caused by the filtering characteristics of Brillouin amplification, and we have suppressed the distortion by detuning the carrier of the signal away from the Brillouin gain peak