Lasers thermodynamics experiments

Temperature Effects on Platinum Single-Crystal/Aqueous Solution Interphases. Combining Gibbs Thermodynamics with Laser-Pulsed Experiments... 

Figure 5.1 Schematic of the experimental set-up. Clusters are produced in a cluster ion source, thermalized and mass-selected in a first time-of-flight (TOP) mass spectrometer. They are irradiated by photons from a pulsed dye laser, and the resultant mass spectrum is measured in a second TOP. Prom the decrease of the originally selected mass one can calculate via Eq. (2) the optical cross-sections. The internal energy V of the cluster leaving the thermalization stage, which is needed in the thermodynamic experiments is obtained from an analysis of the photofragmentation pattern...

A fascinating category of experiments can be found in Table IV. These are the use of lasers to determine thermodynamic parameters. These include calorimetry (43), enthalpies of vaporization and vaporization rates (44, 45), and heat capacities (46). Other laser experiments that can be found in Table IV include the use of CW laser spectroscopy to determine the iodine binding-energy curve (47), the study of vibrational line profiles to determine intermolecular interactions (48), two photon ionization spectrometry (49), a study of optical activity and optical rotatory dispersion (50) and the development of several experiments using blue diode lasers (57). 

Table IV. Laser Experiments Thermodynamic Measurements and Miscellaneous Topics...

Other experimental and theoretical methods have been developed for the determination of the heat of sublimation of solid iodine these too are suitable for undergraduate laboratory experiments or variations on this experiment. Henderson and Robarts have employed a photometer incorporating a He-Ne gas laser, the beam from which (attenuated by a CUSO4 solution) has a wavelength of 632.8 nm, in a hot band near the long-wavelength toe of the absorption band shown in Fig. 3. Stafford has proposed a thermodynamic treatment in which a free-energy function ifef), related to entropy, is used in calculations based on the third law of thermodynamics. In this method either heat capacity data or spectroscopic data are used, and as in the present statistical mechanical treatment, the heat of sublimation can be obtained from a measurement of the vapor pressure at only one temperature. 

In the periodically modulated version of this experiment (32), the laser heating is carried out sinusoidally at a frequency of 5 to 20 Hz, and the resulting sinusoidally varying current, is detected with a lock-in amplifier, as in hydrodynamic modulation. The variation of A/q with E is called thermal modulation voltammetry (TMV). Near, A/p shows a peak whose magnitude for a nemstian reaction is a function of the ratio of the en-tropic energy of the electrode reaction divided by the activation energy of the mass transport process. While the method is capable of extracting thermodynamic information about a reaction, both the theory and the experimental set-up is sufficiently complex that it has not yet found widespread use. 

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