Fabry-Pérot photothermal interferometry in a hollow-core antiresonant fiber for gas detection in mid-infrared

Abstract

Hollow-core antiresonant fiber can simultaneously act as a miniature gas cell and the light guidance with broad wavelength range, introducing an powerful tool to photothermal spectrosocpy and sensitive gas detection. Photothermal interferometry (PTI) is a spectroscopic tehcnique that employs an interferometer to finely measure the photothermal signal of trace gas. By splicing the HC-ARF between solid core fibers, a Fabry-Pérot (F-P) cavity is formed and enables PTI with a brief in-line design. However, the previous structure commonly adopted single-mode solid core fibers and might introduce large optical loss due to mode field mismatch, particularly for MIR pump laser. This could lead to significant decrease in sensitivity. Besides, the gas pressure effect on the HC-ARF-based PTI gas sensor had not been fully studied. In this work, we demonstrated the PTI for 13CO2 detection at 4.35 µm by employing an HC-ARF with a 100-µm core. An InF3 multimode fiber was utilized for the efficient delivery of MIR pump beam and successfully enhanced the pump power by a factor of 6.7. The limit of detection was determined to be 0.4 ppb at the integration time of 240 s. Finally, the relationship between gas pressure and photothermal signal was experimentally studied and compared with theoretical results.