Alongside the research on electrical discharges and their efficiencies, we use advanced time-resolved techniques to understand the physical and chemical mechanisms that drive the processes. Laser-Induced Fluorescence, LIF, and Optical Emission Spectroscopy, OES, have been employed to this end. We have developed a technique to assess the time-resolved conversion of CO2 in a plasma, called collisional energy transfer-laser induced fluorescence (CET-LIF). For a nonâisolated molecule, collisions with the background gas modify the LIF spectrum. We exploited this concept to extract information on the nature of the surrounding particles from changes in the LIF spectrum of a probe molecule, which acts as a transient quantum sensor.
In this work, we discuss the CO2 dissociation degree after a few microseconds from the occurrence of the discharge pulse. We also measured the non-thermal rate constants used in LIF experiments (link to the paper). Using two pulsed lasers, a cutting-edge experimental set-up was used to investigate the energy transfer process of OH, used as the probe molecule.
