AIAA AVIATION Forum
Experimental Demonstration of Dispersion of Rayleigh Brillouin Scattering from Air with an Atomic Cesium Vapor Prism Cell
Anuj Rekhy, Boris S. Leonov, Amirhossein Abbasszadehrad, Junhwi Bak, James R. Creel, Christopher Limbach, Richard B. Miles
Abstract
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3365.vid In this work, we demonstrate a new high throughput, high resolution spectroscopic technique based on dispersion in cesium atomic vapor and use it to image the Rayleigh-Brillouin spectrum from air. This is accomplished by utilizing a prism shaped cesium vapor cell and taking advantage of the steep refractive index in the vicinity of atomic resonances of the cesium D2 hyperfine lines at 852.113 nm. A laser beam from a tunable, continuous, and narrow linewidth Ti:sapphire laser was focused in ambient air and the spectrally dispersed scattering was imaged onto a camera after passing through a 80 mm long cesium prism vapor cell. The strong dispersion enables the measurement of the characteristic thermal and acoustic broadening of the Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering. Mie scattering from particles in the air is also captured and can be separated from molecular Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering by tuning close to the cesium resonance. The trade-off between spectral resolution by dispersion and loss of signal by cesium absorption is analyzed by tuning the laser. This technique shows the feasibility to measure the thermodynamic properties of a gas by reconstruction of the Rayleigh-Brillouin spectrum and could be applicable for advanced LIDAR measurements of atmospheric properties.