Proof of concept for an optogalvanic gas sensor for NO based on Rydberg excitations

Abstract

We demonstrate the applicability of 2-photon Rydberg excitations of nitric oxide (NO) at room temperature in a gas mixture with helium (He) as an optogalvanic gas sensor. The charges created initially from succeeding collisions of excited NO Rydberg molecules with free electrons are measured as a current on metallic electrodes inside a glass cell and amplified using a custom-designed highbandwidth transimpedance amplifier attached to the cell. We fnd that this gas sensing method is capable of detecting NO concentrations lower than 10 ppm even at atmospheric pressures, currently only limited by the way we prepare the gas dilutions.

References in corpus (4)

• Evolution from a molecular Rydberg gas to an ultracold plasma in a seeded supersonic expansion of NO
• Electrical read out for coherent phenomena involving Rydberg atoms in thermal vapor cells
• Triple stack glass-to-glass anodic bonding for optogalvanic spectroscopy cells with electrical feedthroughs
• Arrested relaxation in an isolated molecular ultracold plasma

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Ultra-high-speed Terahertz Imaging Using Atomic Vapour
• Slow decay processes of electrostatically trapped Rydberg NO molecules
• Ultralong-range Rydberg bi-molecules
• Collisional shift and broadening of Rydberg states in nitric oxide at room temperature
• Doppler-free high resolution continuous wave optical UV-spectroscopy on the $\mathrm{A}{}^2{\Sigma }^{+}\leftarrow \mathrm{X}{}^2{\Pi }_{3/2}$ transition in nitric oxide