Methane absorption spectroscopy on a silicon photonic chip

By L. Tombez, E. Zhang, J. Orcutt, S. Kamlapurkar, William M. J. Green. 2017

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Infrared tunable diode-laser absorption spectroscopy (IR-TDLAS) is an enabling technology for trace-gas detection, with applications ranging from air-quality monitoring to medical diagnostics. However, such sensors typically utilize discrete optical components that pose practical cost limits for large-scale network deployments. Here, we leverage silicon photonics technology to demonstrate IR-TDLAS on an integrated CMOS-compatible platform for methane (CH4) spectroscopy. Using near-IR (1650 nm) light from a distributed-feedback laser and an uncooled InGaAs detector, the evanescent optical field of a high-index contrast nanoscale silicon waveguide is used to probe ambient CH4, yielding Gaussian-noise-limited sub-100 parts-per-million by volume detection limits. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of chip-scale photonic integration for realizing compact, cost-effective, and versatile gas sensors capable of tackling diverse energy and environmental challenges, such as natural-gas leak quantification and localization for fugitive-emissions monitoring.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d840d73a70b2d7a2e0270024de7e7e93ba015e0a