Measurements of Lifetimes and Oscillator Strengths of Neutral and Singly Ionized Atoms. Experimental Results of the Last Five Years

After a short description of the standard methods to determine f -values and atomic lifetimes, the most important development of the last years - the application of pulsed dye lasers - is discussed and some results are compared. The further development in the field of f -value measurement is described by some typical activities: emission and absorption measurements with thermal light sources and the application of emission and absorption branching ratio measurements. The general accuracy which can be obtained with the different measuring methods is discussed. The article does not comprehend the whole work which has been done in this field since 1977. There appeared a large number of articles which are not mentioned because of the necessarily limited volume of such a survey. Especially, the treatment of the beam foil technique which yields a lot of lifetimes for singly ionized atoms is omitted completely.