Further study of spectral ripple with a laser scattering measurement apparatus

Abstract To study the spectral effect further, which exists in fold-type cavity ring-down or enhanced absorption spectrometer, a set of laser scattering measurement apparatus was presented and applied to evaluate the surface status of high-reflectivity coatings. Based on this apparatus and another set of optical-feedback cavity ring-down spectrometer with the equivalent noise absorption coefficient of 9.0×10 −9  cm −1 , some experiments are carried out to inspect some analyses about the effect's mechanism. It is determined that the spectral ripple originates from the interference fringe's movement of resonance light beams along the surface of folding mirror, which causes the folding mirror's loss to change with the laser wavelength's scanning. Based on this conclusion, the potential application and the processing methods of spectral ripple are proposed and discussed.