Experimental Evaluation of the UV Raman Lidar Sensitivity in Detection of Traces of Chemical Compounds

Abstract

Experimental results are presented on the remote detection of traces of some chemical compounds on the surface with the help of Raman lidar built on the basis of an excimer KrF laser with a narrow line emission and multi-channel spectrum analyzer based on the diffraction spectrograph and a time gated ICCD camera. The sensitivity of the system is evaluated for the sensing range of 10 m. At the accumulation of the signal over 1000 laser pulses, the detection threshold of the nitrogencontaining chemical compounds of about of units of µg/cm 2 has been reached. The effect of the substrate material on the sensitivity of the Ramanlidar method for detecting traces of chemicals on the surface is analyzed.