Modulated ringdown comb interferometry for sensing of highly complex gases

Gas samples relevant to health1–3 and the environment4–6 typically contain many molecular species that span a huge concentration dynamic range. Mid-infrared frequency comb spectroscopy with high-finesse cavity enhancement has allowed the most sensitive multispecies trace-gas detections so far2,7–13. However, the robust performance of this technique depends critically on ensuring absorption-path-length enhancement over a broad spectral coverage, which is severely limited by comb–cavity frequency mismatch if strongly absorbing compounds are present. Here we introduce modulated ringdown comb interferometry, a technique that resolves the vulnerability of comb–cavity enhancement to strong intracavity absorption or dispersion. This technique works by measuring ringdown dynamics carried by massively parallel comb lines transmitted through a length-modulated cavity, making use of both the periodicity of the field dynamics and the Doppler frequency shifts introduced from a Michelson interferometer. As a demonstration, we measure highly dispersive exhaled human breath samples and ambient air in the mid-infrared with finesse improved to 23,000 and coverage to 1,010 cm−1. Such a product of finesse and spectral coverage is orders of magnitude better than all previous demonstrations2,7–20, enabling us to simultaneously quantify 20 distinct molecular species at above 1-part-per-trillion sensitivity varying in concentrations by seven orders of magnitude. This technique unlocks next-generation sensing performance for complex and dynamic molecular compositions, with scalable improvement to both finesse and spectral coverage.