By Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) April 20, 2024
An ultraviolet photon-counting dual-comb spectrometer. Two ultraviolet frequency combs of slightly different pulse repetition frequencies are generated at very low light levels by nonlinear frequency conversion of near-infrared combs. One ultraviolet comb passes through a sample. The two feeble combs are then superimposed with a beam splitter and detected by a photon-counting detector. At power levels more than one million times weaker than usually employed, the statistics of the detected photons carries the information about the sample with its possibly highly complex optical spectrum. Credit: T.W. Hänsch (MPI of Quantum Optics) and N. Picqué (MPI of Quantum Optics, Max Born Institute).
In a study recently published in Nature, researchers from the Max Born Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have unveiled a new technique for deciphering the properties of matter with light, that can simultaneously detect and precisely quantify many substances with a high chemical selectivity.
Their technique interrogates the atoms and molecules in the ultraviolet spectral region at very feeble light levels. Using two optical frequency combs and a DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07094-9