Numerical investigation of the dependence of stimulated Brillouin scattering threshold on the pump intensity fluctuation

Abstract In this paper, the dependence of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold on the sinusoidal modulated properties of pump pulse is studied. A 527-nm-wavelength, 5 ns square laser pulse with sinusoidal temporal modulation is used as the pump source, and a 600 mm liquid heavy fluorocarbon material FC-40 is used as the Brillouin medium. The numerically calculated results indicate that the SBS threshold increases with the increase of both temporal intensity modulation index and modulation frequency of the pump pulse. However, when the intensity distortion criterion is below 30% or the duration of modulation peaks below three times the phonon lifetime, the SBS threshold tends to remain stable. The numerical results provide assistance to judge the SBS threshold for unsmoothed pump pulses, especially for high power laser applications.