Table of Contents

1: Elementary Properties of light 2: Basic Optics 3: General Characteristics of Lasers 4: Laboratory Lasers 5: Nonlinear Optics 6: Laser Safety 7: The Speed of Light 8: The Speed of Sound in Gases, Liquids and Solids 9: Thermal Lens Calorimetry 10: Laser Refractometry 11: Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy 12: Laser Desorption Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry 13: Multiphoton Ionization Mass Spectrometry of Metal Carbonyls 14: Optical Spectroscopy 15: Quantum Chemistry Calculations 16: Multiphoton Ionization and Third Harmonic Generation in Alkali Atoms 17: Electronic Absorption Spectroscopy of Molecular Iodine 18: Electronic Spectroscopy of Iodine using REMPI 19: Raman Spectroscopy under Liquid Nitrogen 20: Optical Rotary Dispersion of a Chiral Liquid (?-pinene) 21: Faraday Rotation 22: Fermi Resonance in CO2 23: Photoacoustic Spectroscopy of Methane 24: Optogalvanic Spectroscopy 25: Diode Laser Atomic Spectroscopy 26: Vacuum Ultraviolet Spectroscopy using THG in Rare Gases 27: Raman Shifting and Stimulated Electronic Raman Scattering (SERS) 28: Fluorescence Lifetime of Iodine Vapor 29: Raman Spectroscopy Applied to Molecular Conformational Analysis 30: Diffraction of Light from Blood Cells 31: Inversion of Sucrose by Acid Catalyzed Hydrolysis Appendix I. Recommended Components and Equipment Appendix II. Fast Signal Measurements

About the Author

Robert N. Compton was born in Metropolis, IL. The Compton family moved to Oak Ridge, TN during WWII where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. He received degrees in Physics from Berea College (BA), the University of Florida (MS) and the University of Tennessee (PhD). He was a Senior Corporate Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1995 and has been a Professor of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Tennessee to the present date. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus, University of Paris, and the FOM Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, he was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Christchurch, New Zealand. His research interests include negative ions, laser spectroscopy, and molecular chirality. Michael A. Duncan was born in Greenville, SC, where he attended Furman University (B.S. 1976). In graduate school at Rice University he worked with Prof. Richard E. Smalley (Ph.D. 1982). He was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder, CO with Prof. Stephen Leone. He joined the University of Georgia faculty in 1983. He uses laser vaporization, molecular beams, mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy to study metal clusters, ion-molecule complexes and carbocations. Duncan is Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004), and Senior Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry since 1998. He is recipient (2007) of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and won the Experimental Physical Chemistry Award (2011) given by the American Chemical Society.

Reviews

Laser Experiments for Chemistry and Physics is a file resource for experienced physics instructors looking to set up new experiments in advanced lab courses. Compton and Duncan provide both guidance and inspiration in their outstanding collection of laser experiments. * Jason Stalnaker, Physics Today *
a high-quality and useful book ... instructors and students specially focused in the fields of physical chemistry and spectroscopy will most likely find the highest interest; however, readers interested in broader areas of chemistry and physics should also find this work very useful. If you belong to this potential audience, the purchase of Laser Experiments for Chemistry and Physics will doubtless be a good investment. * Germano Montemezzani, Journal of Applied Crystallography *