Phys.org  March 6. 2023 Unburnt hydrocarbon flames produce soot which is the second biggest contributor to global warming. The state-of-the-art high-speed imaging techniques do not provide a complete picture of flame-laser interactions, important for understanding soot formation. An international team of researchers (USA – Caltech, Washington University, Sweden, Germany) has developed single-shot laser-sheet compressed ultrafast photography (LS-CUP) for billion-frames-per-second planar imaging of flame-laser dynamics. They observed laser-induced incandescence, elastic light scattering, and fluorescence of soot precursors – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in real-time using a single nanosecond laser pulse. The spatiotemporal maps of the PAHs emission, soot temperature, primary nanoparticle […]