Hydrogen fluoride laser induced multiphoton decomposition of 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol

The HF laser-induced multiphoton decomposition (MPD) of 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE) was studied for two different "dog-bone" irradiation geometries using TFE pressures from 0.134 to 3.82 kPa. The depletion kinetics of TFE are first order in TFE pressure and the formation kinetics for several of the large number of products display pseudo-first order kinetics with pressure dependent stoichiometric ratios.Three different theoretical models for decomposition probability versus fluence were tested. All were integrated over a complex irradiation geometry and were found to predict equally well the number of decomposed TFE molecules to within a factor of 3 or 4 of the experimental result.