https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202023812003
Cavity-enhanced detection of transient absorption signals
1 Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
2 Medical Physics Unit, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
* e-mail: fernanda.rodriguesmachado@mcgill.ca
** e-mail: lilian.childress@mcgill.ca
Published online: 20 August 2020
We present a simple, high-duty-cycle, cavity-enhanced optical absorption measurement technique based on delay-limited Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) sideband locking. The chosen circuit naturally provides realtime readout of the amplitude quadrature of the PDH error signal, which can be mapped onto the cavity’s internal loss rate while using the phase quadrature to lock sideband frequency to the cavity mode. Our proofof-concept device comprises a 5-cm-long Fabry-Perot cavity with a 450 kHz bandwidth (finesse 6800, 350 ns power ringdown), and a feedback bandwidth of several MHz, limited primarily by the group delay of our electronics. This technique could readily be applied to other optical resonators such as fiber cavities, with potential applications in radiation dosimetry.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
