Intracavity laser tomography of C_2 in an oxyacetylene flame

Abstract
C2 may play an important role in soot formation in some flames and is a major species in acetylene combustion chemistry. In this Letter the technique of intracavity spectroscopy has been combined with a simple tomographic analysis to measure spatially resolved C2-concentration profiles in an oxyacetylene flame. We find that ground-state and excited-state C2 are located in the same region of the flame, suggesting that conditions required for their formation are the same. Our results indicate that the C2 concentration in the mantle region is close to its equilibrium value.