Speaker
Main supervisor (name and email)<br>and his / her institution
CM Steenkamp, (cmsteen@sun.ac.za), SU
Please indicate whether<br>this abstract may be<br>published online<br>(Yes / No)
Yes
Apply to be<br> considered for a student <br> award (Yes / No)?
Yes
Would you like to <br> submit a short paper <br> for the Conference <br> Proceedings (Yes / No)?
No
Level for award<br> (Hons, MSc, <br> PhD, N/A)?
MSc
Abstract content <br> (Max 300 words)<br><a href="http://events.saip.org.za/getFile.py/access?resId=0&materialId=0&confId=34" target="_blank">Formatting &<br>Special chars</a>
In this project the excitation and fluorescence wavelengths for carbon monoxide (CO) in the VUV region are investigated. The narrow spectral bandwidth of the light of our tunable VUV laser source (yielding high spectral resolution and high spectral brightness) allows detection of the fluorescence from weakly absorbing transitions, such as forbidden transitions (FT) of 12C16O. The weak spectral lines of CO are important in astrophysics and laboratory data is lacking. Flow-cooling of CO in a supersonic jet makes it possible to do spectroscopy in conditions similar to conditions in space: collision-free and at temperatures down to a few Kelvin.
By incorporating a scanning monochromator into the existing system we recorded the CO fluorescence spectrum upon VUV excitation and measured self-absorption free rotational excitation spectra of CO in the VUV region. This information was used to accurately determine the temperature of the supersonic jet gas sample. Using the monochromator it was possible to increase the spectral resolution from 0.93 pm to 0.42 pm. The upgraded system has excellent potential for recording of weak forbidden transitions of CO and other molecular gases.
