Pulse compression technique, study

This technique will allow compression of a 100-femtosecond pulse down to 12 femtoseconds or even to 8 femtoseconds. (A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second or 1 x 10-15 s.) Pulse compression can be used to study chemical reactions, particularly intermediate states, at very high speeds. Alternatively, these optical pulses can be converted to electrical pulses to study electrical phenomena. This aspect, of course, is of great interest to people in the electronics industry because of their concern with the operation of high-speed electronic devices. It also is of great interest to people who are trying to understand the motion of biological objects such as bacteria. 

Fig. 5.11. The study of shock compressibility of pressure-sensitive magnetic alloys was carried out with the quartz gauge impact technique. Loading was either with the specimen material or a quartz gauge. Resulting stress pulses were recorded with a quartz gauge (after Graham et al. [67G01]).

In general, multiple pulse techniques sufficiently average the dipolar interactions, compress the chemical shift scale, but they do not affect heteronuclear dipolar interactions and the chemical shift anisotropy. A combination of both multiple pulse techniques and magic angle spinning, so-called CRAMPS (Combined Rotational And Multiple Pulse Spectroscopy) is found to yield satisfactory results in the solid state H NMR of solids 186). The limitations of all these techniques, from the analytical point of view, arises from the relatively small chemical shift range (about 10 ppm) as compared with some other frequently studied nuclei. However, high resolution H NMR of solids is useful in studies of molecular dynamics. 

In the experiments described here, two separate techniques have been used for interferometric characterization of the shocked material s motion frequency domain interferometry (FDI) [69, 80-81] and ultrafast 2-d spatial interferometric microscopy [82-83]. Frequency domain interferometry was used predominantly in our early experiments designed to measure free surface velocity rise times [70-71]. The present workhorse in the chemical reaction studies presented below is ultrafast interferometric microscopy [82], This method can be schematically represented as in Figure 6. A portion of the 800 nm compressed spectrally-modified pulse from the seeded, chirped pulse amplified Ti sapphire laser system (Spectra Physics) was used to perform interferometry. The remainder of this compressed pulse drives the optical parametric amplifier used to generate tunable fs infrared pulses (see below). 

Even in a large fluid bed reactor, the average residence time of the gas is quite short, i.e. a few seconds or tens of seconds. The distribution of gas residence times has been studied by Danckwerts et who concluded that it corresponds much more closely to piston flow than to complete mixing. It is possible to pulse the air supply in order to compress the range of gas residence times and to increase the average residence time. This technique also allows a wider range of particle sizes to be accepted than would otherwise be possible in a fluid-bed process. 

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