Line breadth, inherent

Restricting ourselves to the optical spectra of gases, we now describe phenomena that cause a spectral line to have an inherent breadth. Even observations by a perfectly resolving spectrometer would show this broadening. Can the broadening be removed And if so, under what circumstances To answer these questions, we must first discuss the nature of the broadening. 

Gold s method has been used by a number of workers, including Siska (1973), who applied it to molecular-beam scattering data, MacNeil and Dixon (1977), who applied it to photoelectron spectra, and Jones et al. (1967), who restored infrared spectra of condensed-phase samples. The author is unaware of any experimental results with this method, however, that illustrate the full potential achievable by constrained methods to be described later in this chapter. In the work of Jones et al., the resulting resolution is probably limited by the inherent breadth of spectral lines observed with condensed-phase samples. 

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