Low-noise and high-gain of stimulated Brillouin amplification via orbital angular momentum mode division filtering

We demonstrate a Brillouin amplifier scheme by using orbital angular momentum mode division filtering, which is able to amplify the weak optical signals with low noise and high gain. The system retains the advantages of a conventional collinear Brillouin amplifier structure, and employs a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator to generate distinguishable degree-of-freedom of beams. As we all know, the noise mainly derives from the unwanted coupling in stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) processes, which severely limits the amplifier’s performances. The efficient SBS noise-filtering method is discussed, which could improve the output beam quality effectively. The experimental results show the proposed amplifier scheme can overcome this obstacle, providing the magnification (or called signal gain) of 71 dB for an input signal of 4.7 × 10⁻¹² J. In addition, the amplified signal is recognized from the amplifier spontaneous-emission (ASE)-like noise with a signal-to-noise ratio of 6.7 dB.