Laser Absorption Spectrometry - Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectrometry

Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectrometry

The third way of improving the sensitivity of LAS is to extend the interaction length. This can be obtained by placing the species inside a cavity in which the light bounces back and forth many times, whereby the interaction length can be increased considerably. This has led to a group of techniques denoted as cavity enhanced AS (CEAS). The cavity can either be placed inside the laser, giving rise to intracavity AS, or outside, when it is referred to as an external cavity. Although the former technique can provide a high sensitivity, its practical applicability is limited because of all the non-linear processes involved.

External cavities can either be of multi-pass type, i.e. Herriott or White cells, or be of resonant type, most often working as a Fabry–Pérot (FP) etalon. Whereas the multi-pass cells typically can provide an enhanced interaction length of up to ~2 orders of magnitude, the resonant cavities can provide a much larger path length enhancement, in the order of the finesse of the cavity, F, which for a balanced cavity with high reflecting mirrors with reflectivities of ~99.99–99.999% can be ~ 104 to 105. It should be clear that if all this increase in interaction length can be used efficiently, this vouches for a significant increase in sensitivity!

A problem with resonant cavities is though that a high finesse cavity has very narrow cavity modes, often in the low kHz range (the width of the cavity modes is given by FSR/F, where FSR is the free-spectral range of the cavity, which is given by c/2L, where c is the speed of light and L is the cavity length). Since cw lasers often have free-running linewidths in the MHz range, and pulsed even larger, it is non-trivial to couple laser light effectively into a high finesse cavity. There are though a few ways this can be achieved.