Measurement of Time Varying Optical Absorption

Time sampling techniques have been applied to the study of optical absorption transients. The method is described in terms of its use for the study of the decay of the concentration of metastable atoms following a pulsed discharge. Light from a capillary source is passed through the discharge tube. The transmitted intensity of one of the spectral lines which is absorbed by the metastable atoms is measured using an interference filter and a gated photomultiplier. The photomultiplier gate occurs at twice the discharge frequency so that alternate pulses of the photomultiplier output are reduced by absorption. The component of the photomultiplier output at the discharge frequency is proportional to the absorption and can be measured with a narrow band amplifier and synchronous detector. Since the time resolution of the system is determined by the width of the photomultiplier gate, the response of the synchronous detector can be made slow enough to average the absorption signal over many decay periods. Fluctuations in the number of electrons leaving the cathode of the photomultiplier limit the useful sensitivity of the present system to approximately two parts in 104. This represents a hundredfold improvement in sensitivity over that available with previous techniques. The results of some studies of helium metastables are presented in order to illustrate the detail which can be obtained with this technique.