Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Frequency-stabilized cavity ring-down spectrometer for high-sensitivity measurements of water vapor concentration

Published

Author(s)

Joseph T. Hodges, D Lisak

Abstract

We present a portable spectrometer that uses the frequency-stabilized cavity ring-down spectroscopy technique to realize high-precision measurements of trace water vapor concentration. Measuring one of the strongest rovibrational transitions in the 1 + 3 water vapor combination band near ~ =7181:156 cm 1, we compare spectroscopic and thermodynamic determinations of tracewater vapor in N2, and nd systematic di erences attributable to water vapor background e ects and/or uncertainties in line intensities. We also compare the frequency-stabilized ring-down method with other cavity ring-down approaches that are based on unstabilized probe lasers and unstabilized ring-down cavities. We show that for the determination of water vapor concentration, thefrequency-stabilized cavity ring-down method has the minimum measurement uncertainty of these three techniques. The minimum noise-equivalent absorption coefficient of the spectrometer was 1:2 10 10 cm 1 Hz 1=2.
Citation
Applied Physics B-Photophysics and Laser Chemistry
Volume
85

Keywords

cavity ring down, hygrometer, laser spectroscopy, water vapor

Citation

Hodges, J. and Lisak, D. (2006), Frequency-stabilized cavity ring-down spectrometer for high-sensitivity measurements of water vapor concentration, Applied Physics B-Photophysics and Laser Chemistry (Accessed March 29, 2024)
Created August 12, 2006, Updated February 19, 2017