Nanosecond flash photolysis

Abstract

A flash photolysis system, using a pulsed laser as source, has been designed and used to study events having a duration of a few nanoseconds; an improvement over conventional flash techniques by a factor of a thousand. The apparatus incorporates both spectrographic and photoelectric monitoring techniques which are easily interchangeable and, apart from the laser itself, it is readily constructed from standard components. Its applications to the observation of the absorption spectra of excited singlet states, short-lived excited triplet states and chemical events in the nanosecond time region are described.