The influence of the finite coherence of injected light on the ring-down cavity measurement method and the intensity integral method for the ring-down time determination

Abstract

Using numerical simulation and a constructed cavity ring-down spectroscopy device, the influence of the finite coherence of the injected laser on the coupling process between the injected light and the cavity longitudinal mode was studied. The finite coherence of the injected light leads to the randomness of the coupling pulse during frequency scanning. The randomness is mainly reflected in two aspects: Firstly, as the coherence length decreases, the random amplitude range of the coupling pulse increases. Secondly, as the coherence of the injected light deteriorates, the coupling pulse changes from a single pulse with intensity evolution to continuous multiple pulses, and the overall width gradually increases with the decrease of the scanning rate. Moreover, with the deterioration of the coherence, when the light intensity of the cavity is used to turn off the injected light, the decrease in the scanning rate can cause more than one injection shut-off and ring-down event in a frequency coupling process, especially when scanning with the length of the cavity. In addition, a theoretical method is proposed to estimate the ring-down time using the strength integral of different time intervals, and the relevant experimental verification is carried out. The experimental results show that the relative error of the ring-down time obtained by the intensity integration method is smaller than that obtained by the traditional fitting method.