COVERT- Characterization of Optical fibre and VEry long fibre Bragg gratings in Real Time

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This proposal, COVERT- Characterization of Optical fibre and VEry long fibre Bragg gratings in Real Time, is for the acquisition of an optical frequency domain reflectometer, which allows the characterization of long optical waveguides and fibre Bragg gratings using back-scatter signals. Using interferometry with a frequency swept source, the Rayleigh scatter from optical waveguides, or the reflected signal from a Bragg grating allows the characterization of the distributed refractive index in the optical waveguide and the characterization of the grating in both amplitude and phase. Since Fourier transforms are required to arrive at spatial information, the processing of the signals take a fair amount of time including the sweep time for the source. Our current instrument, which is nearly 7 years old is very slow, taking seconds to minutes to process a measurement. This has caused a bottleneck in our research efforts.