Investigation of Widely tuneable laser diodes for Spectroscopic based Multigas Sensing at 1.

5m
R. Phelan, M. Lynch, J. F. Donegan, and, V. Weldon. Semiconductor Photonics Group, Physics Department, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland Tel. +353-1-6082167 Fax. +353-1-6082680

email: phelanr@tcd.ie

Summary
Widely tuneable single frequency lasers, such as Sampled Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (SGDBR) laser diodes and Strongly Gain Coupled cascaded Distributed feedback (SGC-DFB) laser diodes recently developed for optical communications, present exciting opportunities for applications in the absorption based multi-gas sensing regime. Such wide wavelength tuning is not possible with conventional DFB and DBR lasers, which are limited to the detection of one gas. The typical tuning ranges of the SGDBR (34nm) and SGC-DFB (15nm) respectively, are depicted in Fig. 1 (a) with respect to absorption bands of some important gases. The SGDBR consists of four independently biased sections; a front and back sampled grating mirror, a phase section and a gain section. The device can access wavelengths over the range 1528 nm 1562 nm while maintaining a side mode suppression of 30dB. The unique feature of the SGC-DFB device is that it consists of three cascaded sections (S1, S2 and S3) with the Bragg wavelength of each section shifted by about 5nm relative to the adjacent section. In normal operation the SGC laser device is continuously tuned to different wavelengths by varying the temperature between 5 OC T 50 OC and biasing one laser section at a time with the other two sections biased just below threshold. We targeted the H2S combination band v1+v2+v3 in the 1.57m spectral region with the single frequency emission from S1 and simultaneously the CO2 combination band 2v1+2v2+v3 in the 1.58m spectral region with the single frequency emission from S2 and the measured absorption spectrum is shown Fig. 1 (b). Initial measurements confirm that SGDBR and SGC-DFB lasers are feasible technologies for sensitive absorption based multi-gas detection.
SGDBR Tuning range (34nm) SGC-DFB Tuning range (15nm)
CO CO2

0.2

transmission (arb units)

100

H2 S

S1 S2

0.1 0.0 -0.1 -0.2 -0.3 -0.4

H2 S+CO2

Detectivity (ppm.m)

DFB tuning range (2nm)

HI

10
NH3 C2 H2 HCN

1500 1510 1520 1530 1540 1550 1560 1570 1580 1590 1600

-0.5 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22
0

Wavelength (nm)

temperature, C

(a)

(b)

Fig. 1. Absorption wavelengths of some industrial important gases in the 1.5m region (b) Measured simultaneous absorption spectra of H2S with the emission from S1 and CO2 with the emission from S2, by temperature tuning in the range 0 oC T 20 oC while the drive currents of S1 and S2 was held constant at 80mA and 54mA respectively

Investigation of Widely tuneable laser diodes for Spectroscopic based Multigas Sensing at 1.5m
R. Phelan, M. Lynch, J. F. Donegan, and, V. Weldon. Semiconductor Photonics Group, Physics Department, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland Tel. +353-1-6082167 Fax. +353-1-6082680

email: phelanr@tcd.ie

Abstract
Widely tuneable laser diodes, with wavelength tuning ranges of 34nm and 15nm are used for simultaneous multi-gas sensing. We assess their performance for gases such as Hydrogen Sulphide, Acetylene, and Carbon dioxide.