Analysis of the products of photochemistry using tunable diode lasers, with application to the multiphoton dissociation of chloroform

Tunable diode lasers (TDLs) remain relatively unexploited as a tool in analytical chemistry. We show that TDLs are sensitive analytical tool for investigating the products of photochemical reactions in the gas phase, and give examples from experiments on the IR photochemistry of chloroform. The sensitivity of the TDL technique is such that we can measure the few parts per million of DCL formed by photolysis of natural abundance CDCl₃ in CHCl₃.