MIR-pump NIR-probe fiber-optic photothermal spectroscopy with background-free first harmonic detection

Abstract

We demonstrated MIR-pump NIR-probe photothermal spectroscopy with the first harmonic (PTS-1f) detection of formaldehyde, one of the most common volatile organic compounds (VOCs), in a silica hollow-core negative curvature fiber (HC-NCF). The photothermal gas sensor adopts a mid-infrared interband cascade pump laser at 3.6μm and a near-infrared fiber probe laser at 1.56μm. At the optimal modulation frequency (8 kHz) and modulation index (1.8) of the pump laser, we obtained a normalized noise equivalent absorption (NNEA) coefficient of 4× 10-9 cm-1WHz-1/2. The use of HC-NCF with an inner diameter of 65 μm enables the sensitive photothermal detection even for a very low pump power of micro-watts. The background-free PTS-1f detection was observed to enhance the sensitivity by a factor of 2.4 compared to the second harmonic (2f) detection. A theoretical model was established in this work to interpret the experimental results.