What size is the device?

Yeah, I don't know yet.

So what we're starting with is like a lab prototype device where we won't be detecting actual cow burps.

We'll have a calibrated bottle of methane that we will be able to flow into a sample chamber and then...

Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, we'll be able to see that methane concentration reflected in our measurement readout.

Once that is working, we want to change up some of the nonlinear crystals that we're working with.

So the nonlinear crystals that we use to do splitting photons, the fancy name is spontaneous parametric down conversion, SPDC.

Yeah, so tell me a little bit more about the optomechanics.

So these different frequencies of light that you are generating are able to interact in a way that makes it easier to detect these greenhouse gases.

Yeah, we're focusing on methane and methane has a bunch of absorption features in its spectrum.

So if you imagine shining a light through a sample of methane, if you could change the color of that light bit by bit, you would see that some colors get absorbed more strongly than others.

And this is really familiar to us from the visible spectrum, like playing with paint or something.

You know, if you've been painting red, you put your water in the paintbrush and in your water now it will let red light through but it well it's probably actually a reflection but but it'll block green right yes so methane turns out that it's good at absorbing around the sort of 7.2 to about 8 micrometer wavelength range which is what's called the mid-infrared it's not something we can see visually how our eyesight goes out to 700 nanometers give or take that's red for us and then infrared picks up around 700 800 nanometers you can actually see 780 nanometer light but i don't recommend it so that 7.2 is way way way way outside of our visual range the problem is that it's hard to make light at that wavelength in a controlled manner.

And it's also really difficult to detect light at that wavelength.

We don't have good detectors.

It is worth a look.