Abstract

The introduction of intracavity dye-laser photoacoustic detection inaugurated the, hitherto unexplored, area of gas-phase vibrational overtone molecular spectroscopy.^1–3 We have used this technique to detect extremely weak overtone absorptions in more than 50 molecular systems in the spectral region 1000–400 nm. The molecular systems studied are: benzenes, halomethanes, propenes, and nitriles. Here, we present a summary of our recent work describing the photoacoustic techniques used to record the spectra, reduce the background window noise, optimize intracavity power, and measure absorption cross-sections. Also the characteristics of overtone transitions are reported.

© 1981 Optical Society of America