Lifetime Analysis of Titanium Neutral and Singly-Ionized Species in LIBS’s Plasmas: A Physical Chemistry Experiment

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

¹Department of Math and Sciences, Alvernia University, 400 Saint Bernardine St., Reading, PA

Cite this paper

Alexander Roche, David Shoup and Rosemarie C. Chinni. Lifetime Analysis of Titanium Neutral and Singly-Ionized Species in LIBS’s Plasmas: A Physical Chemistry Experiment. World Journal of Chemical Education. 2017; 5(6):197-202. doi: 10.12691/WJCE-5-6-2

Abstract

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.

Keywords

physical chemistry, atomic spectroscopy, lasers, LIBS

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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