Room-Temperature Optical Detection of ¹⁴CO₂ below the Natural Abundance with Two-Color Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy.

ABSTRACT: Radiocarbon's natural production, radiative decay, and isotopic rarity make it a unique tool to probe carbonaceous systems in the life and earth sciences. However, the difficulty of current radiocarbon (¹⁴C) detection methods limits scientific adoption. Here, two-color cavity ring-down spectroscopy detects ¹⁴CO₂ in room-temperature samples with an accuracy of one-tenth the natural abundance in 3 min. The intracavity pump-probe measurement uses two cavity-enhanced lasers to cancel out cavity ring-down rate fluctuations and strong one-photon absorption interference (>10 000 1/s) from hot-band transitions of CO₂ isotopologues. Selective, room-temperature detection of small ¹⁴CO₂ absorption signals (<1 1/s) reduces the technical

SUBMITTER: McCartt AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10289126 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature