Abstract
The concept of free radicals has long roots in chemistry; according to Herzberg [1.1] it already existed in the 19th century. An identification of a chemically stable free radical triphenylmethyl in the early 20th century gave impetus to the study of free radicals. However, it remained a quite difficult task for chemists to characterize free radicals, because most of them appeared only for a short period of time. A number of simple free radicals, mostly diatomic, were later identified in flames and electrical discharges, by recording and analyzing their emission spectra, e.g., CH, OH, CN, and C2. The advent of new quantum mechanics provided spectroscopy with a sound basis, and brought about remarkable progress in spectroscopic studies of diatomic free radicals in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as compiled by Herzberg in [1.2]. After World War II, Herzberg and his students started high-resolution studies of transient molecules; a new technique of flash photolysis was introduced to generate such species, and emission and absorption spectra were recorded by large grating spectrometers [1.3].
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Hirota, E. (1985). Introduction. In: High-Resolution Spectroscopy of Transient Molecules. Springer Series in Chemical Physics, vol 40. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82477-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82477-7_1
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