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Diode lasers and their applications in spectroscopy

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La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento (1978-1999) Aims and scope

Concluding remarks

The capacity of semiconductor diode lasers allows their applications in different fields ranging from environmental detection to high-precision spectroscopy.

In particular, in this work, we want to show how it is possible, with some experimental approaches, to enhance the laser characteristics regarding the low-amplitude noise and the good spectral purity of the emission light.

The high-sensitivity techniques reported, applied on molecular forbidden transitions in the near-infrared, push the minimum laser absorbances to few parts over 108 and open the possibility to use these compact and low-cost sources as powerful sensors in many trace gas sensing applications.

In the frame of high-resolution spectroscopy, some other techniques that improve the spectral purity of the sources suggest the use of these lasers in metrological applications as secondary frequency standards utilized in frequency chains. In fact, by using simple experimental configurations based on optical feedback scheme it is possible to reduce the laser linewidth of more than two orders of magnitude up to values of tens of kHz.

A section of this work is dedicated to the DFB diode lasers and their application to trace gas sensing utilized for environmental detection.

The presence of a grating already inserted in the semiconductor chip of a distributed feadback laser provides some advantages with respect to the Fabry-Perot lasers: a better long-term frequency stability, a stronger side-mode suppression and less sensitivity to external feedback.

New techniques, always based on the optical feedback principle, and devoted to improve the spectral purity of DFB diode lasers, demonstrate the possibility of an even better line-narrowing with respect to FP lasers.

The low-amplitude noise characteristic of DFB sources allows high sensitive trace gas detections by the use of the same techniques described for the FP lasers. In this case, the sensitivity levels measured are comparable with that obtained with FP laser.

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  1. European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy, Largo E. Fermi 2, I-50125, Firenze, Italy

    F. S. Pavone

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Pavone, F.S. Diode lasers and their applications in spectroscopy. Riv. Nuovo Cim. 19, 1–42 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02755649

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