A quartz enhanced photo-acoustic gas sensor based on a custom tuning fork and a terahertz quantum cascade laser

An innovative quartz enhanced photoacoustic (QEPAS) gas sensing system operating in the THz spectral range and employing a custom quartz tuning fork (QTF) is described. The QTF dimensions are 3.3 cm x 0.4 cm x 0.8 cm, with the two prongs spaced by similar to 800 mu m. To test our sensor we used a quantum cascade laser as the light source and selected a methanol rotational absorption line at 131.054 cm(-1) (similar to 3.93 THz), with line-strength S = 4.28 x 10(-21) cm mol(-1). The sensor was operated at 10 Torr pressure on the first flexion QTF resonance frequency of 4245 Hz. The corresponding Q-factor was 74 760. Stepwise concentration measurements were performed to verify the linearity of the QEPAS signal as a function of the methanol concentration. The achieved sensitivity of the system is 7 parts per million in 4 seconds, corresponding to a QEPAS normalized noise-equivalent absorption of 2 x 10(-10) W cm(-1) Hz(-1/2), comparable with the best result of mid-IR QEPAS systems.