Resolving the mesospheric nighttime 4.3µm emission puzzle: Laboratory demonstration of new mechanism for OH([upsilon]) relaxation

We report laboratory results that support a recently proposed mechanism for relaxation of highly vibrationally excited hydroxyl radical by ground-state oxygen atoms (Sharma et al., GRL 42, 4639-4647 (2015)). According to this mechanism, which eventually leads to an enhancement of nocturnal 4.3µm CO2...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical research letters 2016-09, Vol.43 (17), p.8835
Main Authors: Kalogerakis, Konstantinos S, Matsiev, Daniel, Sharma, Ramesh D, Wintersteiner, Peter P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carbon dioxide emissions
Energy transfer
Hydroxyl radicals
Laboratories
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Summary:We report laboratory results that support a recently proposed mechanism for relaxation of highly vibrationally excited hydroxyl radical by ground-state oxygen atoms (Sharma et al., GRL 42, 4639-4647 (2015)). According to this mechanism, which eventually leads to an enhancement of nocturnal 4.3µm CO2 emissions in the mesosphere, the deactivation of OH(high υ) by O(3P) involves a fast, spin-allowed, multiquantum vibration-to-electronic (V-E) energy transfer process generating O(1D). We present laser-based experiments that demonstrate these energy transfer processes in action and discuss some implications of the new mechanism for mesospheric OH. These developments represent a breakthrough addressing the long-standing problem of unacceptably large discrepancies between models and observations of the nocturnal mesospheric 4.3µm emission.
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007
DOI:10.1002/2016GL069645