Abstract
The need for the detection of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) is no longer confined to battlefield environments because of at least one confirmed terrorist attack, the Tokyo Subway [Emerg. Infect. Dis. 5, 513 (1999)] in 1995, and a suspected, i.e., a false-alarm of a CWA in the Russell Senate Office Building [Washington Post, 9 February 2006, p. B01]. Therefore, detection of CWAs with high sensitivity and low false-alarm rates is considered an important priority for ensuring public safety. We report a minimum detection level for a CWA simulant, dimethyl methyl phosphonate (DMMP), of (parts in ) by use of a widely tunable external grating cavity quantum cascade laser and photoacoustic spectroscopy. With interferents present in Santa Monica, California street air, we demonstrate a false-alarm rate of at a detection threshold of .
© 2008 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
C. S. Kim, W. W. Bewley, V. Nguyen, M. Kim, C. L. Canedy, J. R. Meyer, C. A. Kendziora, R. A. McGill, and I. Vurgaftman
Opt. Express 32(10) 17977-17987 (2024)
Anadi Mukherjee, Manu Prasanna, Michael Lane, Rowel Go, Ilya Dunayevskiy, Alexei Tsekoun, and C. Kumar N. Patel
Appl. Opt. 47(27) 4884-4887 (2008)
Ilya Dunayevskiy, Alexei Tsekoun, Manu Prasanna, Rowel Go, and C. Kumar N. Patel
Appl. Opt. 46(25) 6397-6404 (2007)