Parts-per-quadrillion level gas molecule detection: CO-LITES sensing

Haiyue Sun; Shunda Qiao; Ying He; Xiaorong Sun; Yufei Ma

doi:10.1038/s41377-025-01864-4

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Parts-per-quadrillion level gas molecule detection: CO-LITES sensing

Original Articles

- Parts-per-quadrillion level gas molecule detection: CO-LITES sensing
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 14, Issue 7, Pages: 1882-1892(2025)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.National Key Laboratory of Laser Spatial Information, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
  2.Zhengzhou Research Institute, Harbin Institute of Technology, Zhengzhou 450000, China
- Author bio：
  
  Yufei Ma (mayufei@hit.edu.cn)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-025-01864-4
  CLC：
- Received：04 February 2025，
  
  Revised：02 April 2025，
  
  Accepted：08 April 2025，
  
  Published Online：30 April 2025，
  
  Published：31 July 2025
- Accepted：
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Sun, H. Y. et al. Parts-per-quadrillion level gas molecule detection: CO-LITES sensing. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 1882-1892 (2025).
DOI：

Sun, H. Y. et al. Parts-per-quadrillion level gas molecule detection: CO-LITES sensing. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 1882-1892 (2025). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-025-01864-4.

摘要

Abstract

Highly sensitive gas detection plays a crucial role in advanced scientific and technological fields. This paper presents a parts-per-quadrillion (ppq) level ultra-highly sensitive light-induced thermoelectric spectroscopy (LITES) sensor for the first time. The artificial fish swarm algorithm auto-designed multi-pass cell (MPC) with double helix pattern

and the polymer modified round-head quartz tuning fork (QTF) with low-resonant frequency (

) were adopted to improve the gas absorption and QTF's detection ability. The obtained MPC

with a long optical path length (OPL) of 25.8 m and a small volume of 165.8 ml

is beneficial for increasing gas absorption while keeping the sensor compact. The novel QTF was structurally optimized to obtain low

(~9.5 kHz) and modified by polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to reduce heat diffusion and enhance vibration amplitude. A strong absorption line of carbon monoxide (CO) located in the mid-infrared region (4.59 μm) was chosen as the target line. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of CO-LITES sensor based on the novel QTF was improved by 10.59 times

reaching the highest level when compared to the commercial QTF. The corresponding minimum detection limit (MDL) was calculated to be 23 ppt. When the integration time of the sensor system was increased to 500 s

the MDL could be improved to 920.7 ppq. Compared to the reported spectroscopy techniques for CO gas detection

the LITES sensor in this study offers an excellent result in terms of detection sensitivity.

关键词

Keywords

references

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