Alexander Roche¹, David Shoup¹, Rosemarie C. Chinni^1,

In this physical chemistry laboratory, the students develop experience in using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) to analyze spectral emission data from to determine lifetimes of neutral and singly-ionized titanium species in LIBS plasmas. LIBS is a spectroscopic technique that focuses a high power laser on a surface. The laser heats, ablates, atomizes, and ionizes the surface material which creates a plasma. The light from the plasma is then spectrally resolved and detected. For LIBS experiments, the data can be collected using gated (using time delays and gate widths) or non-gated detection; this experiment uses gated detection taken at various time delays. The time delays used ranged from 0 to 60 μs to create the time decay curves. After creating the time decay curves for the titanium species used in this experiment, the students were able to examine the curves which illustrated the behavior of the neutral and singly-ionized titanium species and also gained experience calculating lifetimes.

physical chemistry, atomic spectroscopy, lasers, LIBS