Knowledge Bank

A tunable dye laser has been used to detect ionic and metastable products of reactions involving rare gas metastable ions. In particular, systems for which results were obtained include $X2\Sigma N2+,a4\Pi gO2+,a3\Pi CO,A3\Sigma u+N2$. The vibrational distribution of these species may be obtained from the excitation spectra. In favorable cases this distribution can be compared to that deduced from an analysis of the chemiluminescence of the reaction. In several cases, distributions obtained in both ways agree closely. However, counter-examples have been found for which the direct laser induced fluorescence distribution differs substantially from that expected from the chemiluminescence, and probable causes of this disagreement will be discussed.