Application of UV Laser-Produced Microplasmas as a Novel Detector for Gas Chromatography

Abstract

Earlier work in our laboratory has demonstrated the unusual ability of UV lasers to produce microplasmas in gaseous flows using very low pulse energies (< 1 mJ). One of the reasons that this pulse energy requirement is so low is that there are strong resonance effects in the production of the seed electrons necessary for microplasma growth. One application of this phenomenon is to use microplasma formation in the effluent gases of a gas chromatograph (GC) as the basis for a new GC detector.