The interplay of thermal and pump fluctuations in stimulated Brillouin scattering

We present a experimental and theoretical investigation of spontaneously initiated stimulated Brillouin scattering in which the interplay of two independent noise sources (thermal and pump) can be studied by controlling the relative importance of each source. We vary the pump noise by adding a controlled amount of Gaussian noise to the input pulses, and we control the contribution of the thermal noise by examining the energy statistics of both entire scattered pulses and of temporal slices of the scattered pulses. We show that the energy of the whole Stokes pulses follow a Gaussian distribution but that the energy of the Stokes pulse slices do not.