Thursday, August 28, 2014

TOMORROW! Physics Seminar: "Octave-wide frequency combs in the mid-infrared and their applications for sensing molecules" Konstantin Vodopyanov/ 8.29.14/ Physical Sciences Room 161

Physics Seminar: "Octave-wide frequency combs in the mid-infrared and their applications for sensing molecules" Konstantin Vodopyanov
Friday, August 29, 2014 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM
Physical Sciences Room 161

Optical frequency combs produced by ultrafast mode-locked lasers have revolutionized precision spectroscopy and time metrology, culminating in the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. I will present a new technique for extending frequency combs to the highly desirable yet difficult-to-achieve mid-infrared range - the region of fundamental molecular fingerprints. The technique is based on subharmonic optical parametric oscillation (OPO) that can be considered as a reverse of second harmonic generation. Using ultrafast erbium or thulium fiber lasers as a pump, we produce frequency combs that can be more than octave wide, e.g. span from 2.5 to 6 µm without gaps. I will talk about coherent properties of the generated mid-IR combs, as well as their applications including trace molecular detection via absorption spectroscopy. Working in the Fourier domain allows taking advantage of massive parallelism of spectral measurements (thanks to the broad spectrum), as well as very high speed of data acquisition (thanks to the coherent nature of the frequency combs), up to 1M spectral points in a fraction of a second.

Contact: Pat Korosec 407-823-2325 

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