Suppressing Stimulated Brillouin Scattering Through Higher Order Mode Excitation in a Multimode Fiber

We numerically and experimentally demonstrate that spreading power into higher order modes of a multimode optical fiber can be used to suppress stimulated Brillouin scattering for a high-power narrow linewidth system. This opens the opportunity for suppressing nonlinear effects in fibers using adaptive mode launching techniques while retaining the ability to produce spatially coherent beams through control of the light phase.