Characterization of luminous beams from laser ablation by imaging techniques

Atomic and molecular species in excited electronic states from laser ablation processes are best studied by two-dimensional imaging techniques. For a prototypical, cylindrically symmetric image pattern, an inverse Abel transform is executed to reconstruct the three-dimensional number density distribution of luminous beams. Quantitative information on the average velocity and the spatial profile of laser-ablated species can be extracted from their spectrally and time-resolved image frames.