Radiative lifetime measurements of vibrational levels of Cl2 + A 2Π u

The radiative lifetimes of several vibrational levels of Cl2 + A 2Π u are measured by a novel technique. A uniform electric field extracts the ions from the observation region of a spectrometer, and the decrease of fluorescence signal as a function of the electric field strength is measured to obtain the radiative lifetime. Measurements are made on 20 different vibronic bands of the Cl2 + A 2Π u -X 2Π g system, and the results are compared with other methods. An attempt is made to correlate the results with the highly perturbed spectroscopic nature of the A 2Π u electronic state.