Doppler splitting generated by shock waves in laser induced breakdown spectroscopy

Abstract

We present a classical spectroscopic approach for investigation of the fast plasma expansion present in Laser Induced Plasma. We show that characteristic form of the spectral lines, caused by significant Doppler effect, contains valuable information regarding the expansion velocity, plasma deceleration, emitters temperature, electron density and so on. The proposed numerical procedure is simple since the inverse Abel transform is not a necessary step. We illustrate this technique analyzing expansion of laser induced copper plasma in ambient gas at low (20Pa) pressure.