Real-time gas density measurement using a ring cavity terahertz parametric oscillator

We carried out real-time measurement of gas density using monochromatic terahertz waves. The THz-wave absorbance is useful to measure the density of a gas having a characteristic spectrum in the THz region. We used the ring cavity THz-wave parametric oscillator (ring-TPO) as a monochromatic tunable THz-wave source. One can change the oscillation frequency of ring-TPO with a rotating galvano mirror forming the ring cavity. The frequency can be changed by synchronization with a repeating pump-pulse of 500 Hz. We demonstrated real-time measurement of the gas density in R-22, which had some spectral structure in THz frequency region. The gas density in the sample cell was changed by controlling the pressure to lower than 1 atm. When the gas density in the cell was the most tenuous, the maximum sensitivity was about 5%, which was limited by the fluctuation of THz-wave intensity.