A few students-led projects investigating the effects of noise and (very) short pulse lengths finally bore fruits, with 3 papers on SBS published:
In Noise and pulse dynamics in backward stimulated Brillouin scattering Optics Express 29 (3), 3132-3146 (2021), and Numerical simulation of noise in pulsed Brillouin scattering J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 38 (8), 2343-2352 (2021), we (in a collaboration led by the University of Technology Sydney) considered the general problem of thermal and laser phase noise in SBS, and devised analytical and numerical methods to calculate how they impact the resulting signal.
In Picosecond acoustic dynamics in stimulated Brillouin scattering Optics Letters 46 (12), 2972-2975 (2021), we (in a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney and Max-Planck Institute for Light) analyzed the limits of SBS induced by optical pulses of length comparable to the period of acoustic oscillations. We found that when two short optical pulses collide in a waveguide, they can excite an acoustic wave with a well-defined momentum, but no frequency info i.e. no hint on which way to propagate!
Mikołaj K. Schmidt 
One thought on “Addressing picosecond and noisy Brillouin scattering”