Studies of rayleigh interference in fiber illuminated by a long coherence length laser

Studies of the coherent Rayleigh backscatter noise (CRN) in a fibre lead illuminated by a laser which has a coherence length longer than the fibre have been conducted. A computationally simple model is presented for this noise based on the interferograms observed at the output of the experimental system. The model is used to calculate the worst case noise which will be obtained as a function of the fibre lead length. Results are presented demonstrating that this simple model achieves reasonable success with very little computation in comparison to previous studies of CRN