Aerosol particle microphotography and glare-spot absorption spectroscopy

The relative intensities of glare spots in the image of an electrodynamically trapped aerosol droplet are measured experimentally with an aerosol particle microscope and calculated theoretically. The theoretical calculations are in good agreement with these experiments and indicate that the intensities of these spots are extremely sensitive to the imaginary part of the refractive index. Experimentally, we obtain the molecular absorption spectrum of an impurity within a droplet by recording the spectrum of an individual glare spot produced by broadband illumination.