Development of a Simple Software Program Used for Evaluation of Plasma Electron Density in LIBS Experiments via Spectral Line Shape Analysis

Abstract

A Software program has been developed in order to perform a fast and reliable calculation to plasma electron density in laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) experiments. This program is based on analyzing the emitted spectral line shape via utilizing facilities of the MatLab7® package to perform this task. This software can perform the following tasks; read the exported data file (*txt-format) from ICCD camera-software, specify the working wavelength of interest, removes the continuum emission component appeared under the line, calculates the spectral line intensity of the line, calculates the spectral shift of the line from the tabulated values, correct against spectral shift jitter at the peak emission, de-convoluting and extracting the different components contributing to the emitted line full width at half of the maxi- mum (FWHM) and finally calculates the plasma electron density. In this article we shall present the results of the test measurement of the plasma electron density utilizing spectral line shape analysis to the emitted Hα-line, Si I-line at 288.15 nm and O I-line at 777.2 nm at different camera delay times ranging from 1 to 5 μs.