Quantification of green house gas sources in the vast and poorly accessible areas of the arctic requires new sensors, small and light enough to be carried by drones – and at the same time sensitive enough to detect CO2 methane at atmospheric concentrations.
However, the sensitivity of commercially available, on-chip trace gas sensors is still at least 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than what is needed for applications in atmospheric monitoring and climate research. This comes as a natural consequence of miniaturization: sensitivity scales with interaction length, which is directly related to instrument size.
The aim of our research is to push the boundary of what is possible with on-chip spectroscopy.