Polarization properties of stimulated Brillouin scattering in single-mode fibers

The polarization properties of stimulated brillouin scattering (SBS) in low birefringent optical fibers were evaluated using Stokes calculus. It was found that the Brillouin gain for orthogonally polarized pump and probe wave is half (in dB) of the gain for identical polarization, and not equal as often mentioned in literature. Therefore the polarization factor is K=11/2 for complete polarization scrambling, and not K=2. The spontaneous SBS has the same state of polarization as the pump, and its degree of polarization is 33.3% for low pump powers and near 100% for high pump powers. The experimental results agree very well with the calculation