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Cavity-Enhanced Spectroscopy on Silica Microsphere Resonators

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Cavity-Enhanced Spectroscopy and Sensing

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Optical Sciences ((SSOS,volume 179))

Abstract

Microcavities are a powerful tool for chemical detection and sensing, but also to study chemical processes at interfaces. In most experiments the cavity mode spectrum is used to infer the chemical composition of the resonator medium and its immediate environment. For example, frequency shifts of cavity modes can be related to either cavity length changes or refractive index changes. Photon lifetime measurements, on the other hand, allow in principle for an independent measurement of the optical loss experienced by a cavity mode, but time-resolved cavity ring-down measurements are difficult due to the small dimensions of the cavity and the consequent short photon lifetimes (ring-down times). This chapter describes how phase-shift cavity ring-down spectroscopy can be adapted to extract the optical loss of a whispering gallery mode in a microresonator. By combining different phase-shift measurements of the total optical loss one can furthermore separate the contributions from intracavity loss due to absorption and scattering from the contributions of optical loss due to coupling to a light delivery waveguide.

The experimental focus is on the use of silica sphere microresonators. The frequency of the high-Q whispering gallery modes in these microspheres is strongly dependent on the size of the sphere whereas the intracavity loss is influenced by surface absorption and scattering. A sub-monolayer of ethylene diamine on a 300 μm sphere has the effect of, simultaneously, changing the resonance frequencies and the ring-down times of the whispering gallery modes. The absolute surface coverage can be extracted from the resonance frequency, and can be combined with the measurement of intracavity loss to determine the absolute absorption cross section of ethylene diamine at sub monolayer coverage.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Photonics Research Ontario (Ontario Centres of Excellence) for financial support of this work. Contributions from the Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations (CIPI), from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Queen’s University are acknowledged by the Canadian researchers. GG also acknowledges financial support from the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (PON-SIMONA) and assistance from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche by the RSTL-project (cod. 3007) and the CNR Short-Term Mobility Program 2008.

Finally, we thank Zhaobing Tian for providing some of the tapered fiber waveguides, Saverio Avino for his help in setting up the PDH-coupling scheme, and Scott Yam, James Fraser, and Mark Wilson for their help in deriving Eq. (10.49) in Sect. 10.2.6.3.

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  1. Dept. of Chemistry, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

    Jack A. Barnes & Hans-Peter Loock

  2. Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Comprensorio “A. Olivetti”, via Campi Flegrei 34, 80078, Pozzuoli (Napoli), Italy

    Gianluca Gagliardi

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Correspondence to Jack A. Barnes .

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  1. CNR-Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO), Pozzuoli, Italy

    Gianluca Gagliardi

  2. Dept. of Chemistry, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

    Hans-Peter Loock

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Barnes, J.A., Gagliardi, G., Loock, HP. (2014). Cavity-Enhanced Spectroscopy on Silica Microsphere Resonators. In: Gagliardi, G., Loock, HP. (eds) Cavity-Enhanced Spectroscopy and Sensing. Springer Series in Optical Sciences, vol 179. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40003-2_10

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