Interferometer Sensitivity

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Market overview These new methods involve a liquid-based continuously tunable attenuator and spectrum engineering techniques to significantly improve high-frequency interferometer sensitivity. Improved interferometer sensitivity would be advantageous for the wide chemical analytical systems market, which includes high performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, and biological sensors. There is a strong interest in minimizing the volume and concentration of sample materials while still maintaining sensitivity of the analytical systems. Unfortunately, current technologies are not able to give accurate readings with the reduced size desired. Clemson University researchers have developed several engineering techniques that, when combined with a continuously tunable attenuator, give unrivaled sensitivity that uses less material for analysis, thus improving cost-effectiveness. Technical summary This approach involves the operation of a highly sensitive, tunable and stable RF interferometer, which is based on quadrature-hybrids. The continuously tunable attenuator component uses liquids at different volumes to tune the operation of the interferometers for high sensitivity operations. The spectrum engineering techniques introduce filters, resonators, and fast waves that increase the interaction times between RF fields and materials. The interferometer has been tested to characterize and analyze DNA molecules in water solutions. The resonators and filters effectively demonstrate significantly improved RF interferometer sensitivities. The magnitude sensitivity improved by as much as 35 dB and the frequency sensitivity by as much as 10 times.