Detection of vibrational-overtone excitation in water via laser-induced grating spectroscopy

In this paper we describe a method, based on the laser-induced grating technique, for studying the spectroscopy of vibrational overtone-excited gas-phase water. Two phase-coherent visible laser beams whose frequencies are in the range of the third overtone of the OH stretch in water are crossed in the gas-phase sample. As the wavelength of these excitation beams is scanned through individual rovibrational OH overtone transitions, vibrational energy is deposited into the water in a spatially sinusoidal pattern. A fixed-frequency 266 nm probe laser beam is diffracted from the resultant transmission diffraction grating in water. We show that under collision-free conditions, probe laser diffraction is observed from the initially excited grating, which is a necessary condition for using this technique to study the absorption spectroscopy of the vibrationally excited molecules. Under multiple collision conditions, a probe laser wavelength-independent refractive index grating is formed within the bulk sample. In addition, we observe temporal oscillations in the grating diffraction efficiency arising from excitation of standing acoustic waves