Single-tube on-beam quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy

Quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) with a single-tube acoustic microresonator (AmR) inserted between the prongs of a custom quartz tuning fork (QTF) was developed, investigated, and optimized experimentally. Due to the high acoustic coupling efficiency between the AmR and the QTF, the single-tube on-beam QEPAS spectrophone configuration improves the detection sensitivity by 2 orders of magnitude compared to a bare QTF. This approach significantly reduces the spectrophone size with respect to the traditional on-beam spectrophone configuration, thereby facilitating the laser beam alignment. A 1σ normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient of 1.21×10−8 cm−1·W/Hz was obtained for dry CO2 detection at normal atmospheric pressure.