A highly sensitive LITES sensor based on a multi-pass cell with dense spot pattern and a novel quartz tuning fork with low frequency

A highly sensitive light-induced thermoelectric spectroscopy(LITES)sensor based on a multi-pass cell(MPC)with dense spot pattern and a novel quartz tuning fork(QTF)with low resonance frequency is reported in this manuscript.An erbi-um-doped fiber amplifier(EDFA)was employed to amplify the output optical power so that the signal level was further enhanced.The optical path length(OPL)and the ratio of optical path length to volume(RLV)of the MPC is 37.7 m and 13.8 cm^(-2),respectively.A commercial QTF and a self-designed trapezoidal-tip QTF with low frequency of 9461.83 Hz were used as the detectors of the sensor,respectively.The target gas selected to test the performance of the system was acetylene(C2H2).When the optical power was constant at 1000 mW,the minimum detection limit(MDL)of the C2H2-LITES sensor can be achieved 48.3 ppb when using the commercial QTF and 24.6 ppb when using the trapezoid-al-tip QTF.An improvement of the detection performance by a factor of 1.96 was achieved after replacing the commer-cial QTF with the trapezoidal-tip QTF.

Compensation of Parasitic Capacitance of Quartz Tuning Fork in AFM

We have built an atomic force microscope using a quartz tuning fork as sensor. The excitation method we adopted, the electrical excitation, introduces stray capacitance into the signal-processing circuit. In this report, we demonstrated a simple but effective method to compensate for this parasitic capacitance by adding a compensator circuit consisting of an inverting amplifier and a capacitor. The capacitor is connected in series with the inverting amplifier and the compensator is connected in parallel with the quartz tuning fork. The resonance curve of the system measured after adding the homemade compensator resembles that of a pure RLC circuit, meaning that the stray capacitance is successfully eliminated. Furthermore, we tried to use our equipment to measure PDMS sample and got clean data. This system can be further combined with confocal microscope and diamond with NV defect to build scanning NV magnetometry.

Highly sensitive CO_(2)-LITES sensor based on a self-designed low-frequency quartz tuning fork and fiber-coupled MPC

A highly sensitive carbon dioxide(CO_(2))sensor based on light-induced thermoelastic spectroscopy(LITES)utilizing a selfdesigned low-frequency quartz tuning fork(QTF)and a fiber-coupled multipass cell(MPC)is reported in this paper.The QTF with a low resonant frequency of 8675 Hz and a high Q factor of 11,675.64 was used to improve its energy accumulation time and the sensor’s signal level.The MPC with the fiber-coupled structure and optical length of 40 m was adopted to significantly increase the gas absorbance and reduce the optical alignment difficulty as well as improve the robustness of the sensor system.A distributed feedback(DFB),near-infrared diode laser with an emission wavelength of 1.57μm was used as an excitation source.The experimental results showed that this CO_(2)-LITES sensor had an excellent linear response to CO_(2) concentrations.The minimum detection limitation(MDL)of this CO_(2)-LITES sensor was obtained to be 445.91 ppm,and it could be improved to 47.70 ppm(parts per million)when the integration time of the system reached 500 s.Further improvement methods for the detection performance of such sensors were also discussed.

Sensitive carbon monoxide detection based on light-induced thermoelastic spectroscopy with a fiber-coupled multipass cell[Invited]

sensor based on light-induced thermoelastic spectroscopy(LITES)with a fiber-coupled multipass cell was demonstrated for carbon monoxide(CO)detection.The fiber-coupled structure has the merits of reducing optical interference and difficulty in optical alignment and increasing system robustness.A 1.57 nm continuous wave distributed feedback diode laser was used as the excitation source.A minimum detection limit of 9 ppm was obtained,and the calculated normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient was 1.15×10^(-7)cm^(-1)•W•Hz^(-1/2).The reported CO-LITES sensor showed excellent linear concentration response and system stability.