An all-optical off-beam quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy employing double-pass acoustic microresonators

Abstract An all-optical off-beam quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) sensor employing double-pass acoustic microresonators was proposed and experimentally investigated. An optical fiber Fabry–Perot interferometric sensor with quadrature point self-stabilization was employed for the detection of quartz prong vibration. A commercial quartz tuning fork with a resonant frequency of 30.72 kHz was employed as an acoustic transducer. Water vapor as the catalyst was added for improving the vibrational energy transfer. The minimum detection limit of ∼ 2.41 ppmv was obtained with a 1 s averaging time, which corresponded to a normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient of 7.76 × 10−8 cm−1 W Hz−1/2 at the methane absorption line of 6046.95 cm −1 with an optimized modulation depth of 0.172 cm −1. The detection sensitivity was enhanced by a factor of ∼ 1.48 in comparison to the off-beam QEPAS employing a single-pass microresonator. An Allan deviation analysis indicated that the ultimate detection limit for the QEPAS-based sensor was ∼ 0.288 ppmv at the optimum averaging time of ∼ 125 s.