Real-Time Acquisition and Preprocessing of Kinetic and Spectroscopic Data in Laser Flash Photolysis

An automatic flash photolysis system for the measurement of absorption decays and transient difference spectra is described. The apparatus performs a digital measurement of the light transmitted by the sample and a few on-line preprocessing operations on the measured data, such as the digital averaging of the signal and the computation of the change in absorbance. A boxcar averager, used as a gated integrator, constitutes the sampling head of the apparatus. A microprocessor-based acquisition and control unit performs a digital conversion of the value sampled by the boxcar, provides an on-line preprocessing of the data, and supervises every operation required by the measurement process. This unit is interfaced to a personal computer which allows a friendly interaction with the operator as well as the on-line display of the data. The electronic instrumentation features a time resolution of a few nanoseconds, with a boxcar averager as input head, and of a few hundreds of picoseconds, with a sampling oscilloscope as input head