Tunability, laser spectroscopy

As described above, classical infrared spectroscopy using grating spectrometers and gas cells provided some valuable infonnation in the early days of cluster spectroscopy, but is of limited scope. However, tire advent of tunable infrared lasers in tire 1980s opened up tire field and made rotationally resolved infrared spectra accessible for a wide range of species. As for microwave spectroscopy, tunable infrared laser spectroscopy has been applied botli in gas cells and in molecular beams. In a gas cell, tire increased sensitivity of laser spectroscopy makes it possible to work at much lower pressures, so tliat strong monomer absorjDtions are less troublesome. 

From 1960 onwards, fhe increasing availabilify of intense, monochromatic laser sources provided a fremendous impetus to a wide range of spectroscopic investigations. The most immediately obvious application of early, essentially non-tunable, lasers was to all types of Raman spectroscopy in the gas, liquid or solid phase. The experimental techniques. 

For the visible and near-ultraviolet portions of the spectmm, tunable dye lasers have commonly been used as the light source, although they are being replaced in many appHcation by tunable soHd-state lasers, eg, titanium-doped sapphire. Optical parametric oscillators are also developing as useful spectroscopic sources. In the infrared, tunable laser semiconductor diodes have been employed. The tunable diode lasers which contain lead salts have been employed for remote monitoring of poUutant species. Needs for infrared spectroscopy provide an impetus for continued development of tunable infrared lasers (see Infrared technology and RAMAN spectroscopy). 

An interesting variation of Raman spectroscopy is coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) (99). If two laser beams, with angular frequencies CO and CO2 are combined in a material, and if cjj — is close to a Raman active frequency of the material, then radiation at a new frequency CJ3 = 2cJ2 — may be produced. Detection of this radiation can be used to characterize the material. Often one input frequency is fixed and the other frequency, from a tunable laser, varied until matches the Raman frequency. CARS has the capabiHty for measurements in flames, plasmas, and... 

Lead Telluride. Lead teUuride [1314-91 -6] PbTe, forms white cubic crystals, mol wt 334.79, sp gr 8.16, and has a hardness of 3 on the Mohs scale. It is very slightly soluble in water, melts at 917°C, and is prepared by melting lead and tellurium together. Lead teUuride has semiconductive and photoconductive properties. It is used in pyrometry, in heat-sensing instmments such as bolometers and infrared spectroscopes (see Infrared technology AND RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY), and in thermoelectric elements to convert heat directly to electricity (33,34,83). Lead teUuride is also used in catalysts for oxygen reduction in fuel ceUs (qv) (84), as cathodes in primary batteries with lithium anodes (85), in electrical contacts for vacuum switches (86), in lead-ion selective electrodes (87), in tunable lasers (qv) (88), and in thermistors (89). 

In dimers composed of equal molecules the dimer components can replace each other through tunneling. This effect has been discovered by Dyke et al. [1972] as interconversion splitting of rotational levels of (HF)2 in molecular beam electric resonance spectra. This dimer has been studied in many papers by microwave and far infrared tunable difference-frequency laser spectroscopy (see review papers by Truhlar [1990] and by Quack and Suhm [1991]). The dimer consists of two inequivalent HE molecules, the H atom of one of them participating in the hydrogen bond between the fluorine atoms (fig. 60). PES is a function of six variables indicated in this figure. 

Dye lasers have been one of the most widely used types of tunable laser. In pulsed conditions, typical peak powers are in the range of 10 -10 W. In the cw regime, reported powers are in the order of watts, with linewidths of around 1 MHz. Due to their flexibility in design and performance, dye lasers have been commonly used in a great variety of spectroscopic techniques, including high-resolution spectroscopy. 

Hinkl, E. D., K. W. Nill, and F. A. Blum. Infrared spectroscopy with tunable lasers, pp. 125-1%. In H. Walther, Ed. Laser Spectroscopy of Atoms and Molecules. New York Springer-Verlag, 1976. 

R.F. Curl and F.K. Tittel, Tunable infrared laser spectroscopy, Armu. Rep. Prog. Chem., Sect. C, 98, 1-56... 

A tunable IR laser spectroscopy analyzer has been demonstrated on several applications to accurately control slip. 

Other infrared absorption techniques are also used in ambient air measurements, including tunable diode laser spectroscopy (TDLS), nondispersive infrared (NDIR) spectroscopy, and matrix isolation spectroscopy. These are discussed in more detail later. 

FIGURE 11.31 Comparison of gaseous HN03 measurements made simultaneously in Claremont, California, on two different days using FT-IR shown as with error bars and by a filter pack (FP), a difference denuder (DD), an annular denuder (AD), and tunable diode laser spectroscopy (TDLS) (adapted from Hering et al., 1988). 

Later chapters detail application of the present method to electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (Chapter 5), high-resolution dispersive infrared spectroscopy (Chapter 6), and tunable-diode-laser spectroscopy (Chapter 7). Because the heart of the method is the repeated application of simple convolution, the method has been adapted to the processing of images (Kawata et al, 1978 Kawata and Ichioka, 1980a Saghri and Tescher, 1980 Maitre, 1981 Gindi, 1981). 

Tunable laser spectroscopic techniques such as laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) or resonantly enhanced multi-photon ionization (REMPI) are well-established mature fields in gas-phase spectroscopy and dynamics, and their application to gas-surface dynamics parallels their use elsewhere. The advantage of these techniques is that they can provide exceedingly sensitive detection, perhaps more so than mass spectrometers. In addition, they are detectors of individual quantum states and hence can measure nascent internal state population distributions produced via the gas-surface dynamics. The disadvantage of these techniques is that they are not completely general. Only some interesting molecules have spectroscopy amenable to be detected sensitively in this fashion, e.g., H2, N2, NO, CO, etc. Other interesting molecules, e.g. 02, CH4, etc., do not have suitable spectroscopy. However, when applicable, the laser spectroscopic techniques are very powerful. 

The use of tunable lasers as sources in electronic absorption and emission spectroscopy has made possible a very considerable increase in resolution and precision. Electronic spectra are often difficult to analyze because of the many transitions involved. However, with a tunable laser source, one can tune the laser frequency to a specific absorption frequency of the molecule under study and thus populate a single excited electronic vibration-rotation energy level the resulting fluorescence emission spectrum is then simple, and easy to analyze. 

Airborne tunable laser absorption spectrometer infrared absorption by tunable diode laser spectroscopy 41... 

Wall-coated flow tube reactors have been used to study the uptake coefficients onto liquid and solid surfaces. This method is sensitive over a wide range of y (10" to 10 1). For liquids this method has the advantage that the liquid surface is constantly renewed, however if the uptake rate is fast, the liquid phase becomes saturated with the species and the process is limited by diffusion within the liquid, so that corrections must be applied [70,72,74]. Many experiments were designed to investigate the interaction of atmospheric species on solid surfaces. In this case the walls of the flow tube were cooled and thin films of substrate material were frozen on the wall. Most of the reaction probabilities were obtained from studies on flow tubes coated with water-ice, NAT or frozen sulfate. Droplet train flow tube reactors have used where liquid droplets are generated by means of a vibrating orifice [75]. The uptake of gaseous species in contact with these droplets has been measured by tunable diode laser spectroscopy [41]. 

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