High finesse hollow-core fiber resonating cavity for high sensitivity gas sensing application

We present all-fiber resonating Fabry-Perot gas cells made with a piece of hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (HCPBF) sandwiched by two single mode fibers with mirrored ends. A HC-PBF cavity made of 6.75-cm-long HC-1550-06 fiber achieved a cavity finesse of 128, corresponding to an effective optical path length of 5.5 m. Such HC-PBF cavities can be used as absorption cells for high sensitivity gas detection with fast response. Preliminary experiment with a 9.4cm-long resonating gas cell with a finesse of 68 demonstrated a detection limit better than 7.5 p.p.m. acetylene.