Project description
Gas analysis using compact infrared spectrometers
Detecting and measuring tiny amounts of greenhouse and toxic gases is crucial for protecting our environment, as outlined in the EU’s Zero Pollution plan. Mid-infrared spectroscopy is a powerful tool for this, offering incredible sensitivity down to parts per billion. Yet current instruments are bulky, expensive and complex, limiting their use to specialised applications. The EIC-funded UNISON project aims to create a compact, high-performance platform for mid-infrared spectroscopy. Using electrically pumped cascade lasers and silicon-germanium photonic circuits, UNISON will develop a scalable system with enhanced detection capabilities to the infrared. Project breakthrough could enable portable, IoT-compatible sensors, making precise gas detection more accessible for widespread environmental monitoring.
Objective
"High resolution optical spectroscopy in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectral range (3-12 µm wavelength) is an unambiguous way to detect and quantify small traces of greenhouse and toxic gases down to sensitivities of parts-per-billion. Such sensitivities are a prerequisite to safeguard low-pollution and toxic-free environment defined by the EU Action Plan: ""Towards a Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil.” However, size, cost, and general complexity of the commercially available instruments limits their use to a small number of highly specialized applications, and prevents their deployment with sufficient coverage e.g. in networks, wearable electronics, etc. Particularly in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, on chip integration of spectroscopic systems would constitute a game changer for mid-IR high-precision and portable sensors.
The objective of UNISON is to address this challenge and demonstrate a highly scalable platform for infra-red spectroscopy that has both high-end performance and is compact. UNISON sensing scheme relies on dual comb spectrometers obtained by leveraging on electrically pumped cascade lasers (QCL and ICL) and on silicon-germanium (SiGe) mid-IR photonic circuits to surpass current spectroscopic systems in terms of detection bandwidth, point spacing and system compactness. UNISON is organized around 3 main cornerstones each of them relying on ambitious physical and technological challenges: (i) tunable large bandwidth frequency combs will be generated on SiGe photonics circuits by combining electro-optical comb generation, non-linear effects and dispersion engineering ; (ii) the comb sources will be pumped by novel electrically-driven cascade laser sources integrated with the SiGe photonics circuits ; (iii) compact, broadband, and sensitive interaction region for trace gas detection, designed and optimized for the SiGe platform, will be integrated with the dual comb source to showcase the sensing capability of the spectrometer.
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Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences internet internet of things
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry metalloids
- natural sciences physical sciences optics laser physics
- natural sciences physical sciences optics spectroscopy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2023-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
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75794 Paris
France
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