Comb-assisted, Pound-Drever-Hall locked cavity ring-down spectrometer for high-performance retrieval of transition parameters.

Abstract

Fast and high-performance cavity ring-down spectrometer (CRDS) is highly desired to precisely extract spectral parameters. In this paper, we present our comb-assisted Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) locked CRDS setup, aiming to retrieve molecular parameters. In the setup, a dynamic feedback is used to keep the tight PDH locking even under strong absorption in the spectral measurement. PDH light and probing light enter the ring-down cavity simultaneously under orthogonal polarization, which enables a fast acquisition of ring-down events without interrupting PDH locking. Ultra-stable cavity temperature is realized, which has an accuracy below 0.5 mK in 27 minutes. The optical frequency comb (OFC) system is developed to rapidly and automatically measure the frequency axis with a relatively wide beat-note range. The minimum detectable absorption coefficient and noise-equivalent absorption coefficient (NEA) are 7.6×10-12cm-1 and 5.3×10-12cm-1Hz-1/2, respectively. The spectrometer is implemented to measure CO2 transition and extract line parameters. The uncertainty for line position is evaluated to be 120 kHz. An accuracy of 0.31% for line intensity is beneficial to the precise determination of CO2 content for the purpose of environment protection and other applications.