This work presents a detailed review of the development of distributed acoustic sensors (DAS) and their newest scientific applications. It covers most areas of human activities, such as the engineering, material, and humanitarian sciences, geophysics, culture, biology, and applied mechanics. It also provides the theoretical basis for most well-known DAS techniques and unveils the features that characterize each particular group of applications. After providing a summary of research achievements, the paper develops an initial perspective of the future work and determines the most promising DAS technologies that should be improved.

The generation of surface plasmon resonances (SPRs) in gold-coated weakly tilted fiber Bragg gratings (TFBGs) strongly depends on the state of polarization of the core guided light. Recently, it was demonstrated that rotating the linear state of polarization of the guided light by 90° with respect to the grating tilt allows to turn the SPR on and off. In this work, we measure the Jones matrix associated to the TFBG transmission properties in order to be able to analyze different polarization-related parameters (i.e. dependency on wavelength of polarization dependent loss and first Stokes parameter). As they contain the information about the SPR, they can be used as a robust and accurate demodulation technique for refractometry purposes. Unlike other methods reported so far, a tight control of the input state of polarization is not required. The maximum error on refractive index measurement has been determined to be ~1 10⁻⁵ refractive index unit (RIU), 5 times better than intensity-based measurements on the same sensors.

A new method for monitoring the nonlinearities perturbing the optical frequency sweep in high speed tunable laser sources is presented. The swept-frequency monitoring system comprises a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and simple signal processing steps. It has been implemented in a coherent optical frequency domain reflectometer which allowed to drastically reduce the effects of nonlinear sweep, resulting to a spatial resolution enhancement of 30 times.

A support vector machine (SVM)-based classification nonlinear equalizer (NLE) is demonstrated, for the first time, in coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM). For a 40-Gb/s 16 quadrature amplitude modulated (16QAM) CO-OFDM system at 400 km of transmission, SVM-NLE reduces the fiber-induced nonlinearity penalty by about 1 dB in comparison to the benchmark artificial-neural-network (ANN)-based and inverse-Volterra-series-transfer-function-based NLEs.

In this paper, we discuss the operation principles, challenges and application areas of optical frequency domain reflectometry technique. A review of OFDR systems is given considering both Incoherent-OFDR and Coherent-OFDR groups. Results obtained by different research groups are compared in terms of performance characteristics, and future perspectives. Recent progresses obtained within our laboratory are also presented.

We report an all-fiber passively mode-locked laser at 1030 nm. The principle of this ultrafast laser is based on nonlinear polarization evolution occurring in a long span of birefringent fiber spliced between a polarizer and a Faraday mirror. This configuration supports a large variety of pulsed regimes: noise-like, multiple pulses, burst, and single pulse mode-lock operation. In the single pulse mode-lock regime, the pulse duration is ~ 17.8 ps at a low repetition rate of 948 kHz. The spectral bandwidth is ~ 2.2 nm, the pulse energy is 68 pJ, and the polarization extinction ratio is estimated to 15 dB.