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Modifications To A Cavity Ringdown Spectrometer To Improve Data Acquisition Rates, Gregory Alan Bostrom

Dissertations and Theses

Cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) makes use of light retention in an optical cavity to enhance the sensitivity to absorption or extinction of light from a sample inside the cavity. When light entering the cavity is stopped, the output is an exponential decay with a decay constant that can be used to determine the quantity of the analyte if the extinction or absorption coefficient is known. The precision of the CRDS is dependent on the rate at which the system it acquires and processes ringdowns, assuming randomly distributed errors. We have demonstrated a CRDS system with a ringdown acquisition rate of …