Spectroscopic Aspects of Lasers in Medicine

The annual world demand for such isotopes may only be of the order of 100 gi ams, but smce conventional production methods are extremely costly, laser isotope separation might here be an attractive possibility. 

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In the previous chapter we have seen how tunable lasers can be used in a multitude of ways to gain basic information on atomic and molecular systems. Thus, the laser has had a considerable impact on basic research, and its utility within the applied spectroscopic field is not smaller. We shall here discuss some applications of considerable interest. Previously, we have mainly chosen atomic spectroscopic examples rather than molecular ones, but in this chapter we shall mainly discuss applied molecular spectroscopy. First we will describe diagnostics of combustion processes and then discuss atmospheric monitoring by laser techniques. Different aspects of laser-induced fluorescence in liquids and solids will be considered with examples from the environmental, industrial and medical fields. We will also describe laser-induced chemical processes and isotope separation with lasers. Finally, spectroscopic aspects of lasers in medicine will be discussed. Applied aspects of laser spectroscopy have been covered in [10.1,2]. 

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