Compensation of phase error in optical frequency-domain reflectometry using delay-matched sampling

We proposed and experimentally demonstrated a delay-match sampling method to measure and compensate the laser phase error in optical frequency-domain reflectometry system. By using the error signal extracted from a simple auxiliary Mach-Zehnder interferometer with only a 10-ns delay, the laser phase error is effectively compensated. Considerable improvement is achieved in spatial resolution from 200 m to 7 cm at a measurement distance over 10 times the round-trip laser coherence length.