Abstract

The luminosity-resolving power products of several different types of modern spectrometric imaging and nonimaging systems have been compared. It is shown that if a narrow-band signal is detected in the presence of strong, spectrally continuous background, the luminosity-resolving power product is the critical figure of merit controlling the potential signal-to-noise ratio. Within a spectral resolving power range of 10⁵-10⁹, the signal-to-noise ratio that can be attained by atomic vapor detectors and filters, and by resonance ionization detectors in particular, can be 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than that for the best traditional spectroscopic approaches.

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