Room-Temperature Optical Detection of 14 CO 2 below the Natural Abundance with Two-Color Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy.

Radiocarbon's natural production, radiative decay, and isotopic rarity make it a unique tool to probe carbonaceous systems in the life and earth sciences. However, the difficulty of current radiocarbon ( 14 C) detection methods limits scientific adoption. Here, two-color cavity ring-down spectroscopy detects 14 CO 2 in room-temperature samples with an accuracy of one-tenth the natural abundance in 3 min. The intracavity pump-probe measurement uses two cavity-enhanced lasers to cancel out cavity ring-down rate fluctuations and strong one-photon absorption interference (>10 000 1/s) from hot-band transitions of CO 2 isotopologues. Selective, room-temperature detection of small 14 CO 2 absorption signals (<1 1/s) reduces the technical and operational burdens for cavity-enhanced measurements of radiocarbon, which can benefit a wide range of applications like biomedical research and field-detection of combusted fossil fuels.