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“The Measurement and Physics of Vibrational Stark Effects”

A PhD Dissertation by Steven Andrews, Stanford University, 2001.



Preliminary pages – Title page, copyright, abstract, preface, contents, lists of tables and figures.

Chapter 1 – “Introduction.”  About electric fields in matter, the history of Stark spectroscopy, and a brief literature review of vibrational Stark effects.

Chapter 2 – “A liquid nitrogen immersion cryostat for optical measurements.”  Identical to the Rev. Sci. Instrum. 2000 paper, but with a few extra comments.  See the Hardware web page for more about it.

Chapter 3 – “Analysis of noise for rapid-scan and step-scan methods of FTIR difference spectroscopy.”  Identical to the Appl. Spectrosc. 2001 paper.

Chapter 4 – “Analysis of Stark spectroscopy data.”  This chapter is not published elsewhere because it is quite technical and is specific to Stark spectroscopy using immobilized samples.  However, it is also the only source I know of that addresses these details in a precise manner.  It also includes several useful equations for data analysis.

Chapter 5 – “Vibrational Stark spectroscopy in proteins: A probe and calibration for electrostatic fields.”  Identical to the J. Phys. Chem. B 1999 paper.

Chapter 6 – “Vibrational Stark effects of nitriles.  I. Methods and experimental results.” Identical to the J. Phys. Chem. A 2000 paper, but with a few corrections at the end.

Chapter 7 – “Vibrational Stark effects of nitriles.  II. Physical origins of Stark effects from experiment and perturbation models.”  This is a draft version of the J. Phys. Chem. A 2002 paper.  There is a conceptual mistake in this chapter regarding the transition dipole moment, caught by Prof. Noel Hush, which has significant consequences in many equations and results.  These mistakes are corrected in the journal version, which also includes many other clarifications and improvements.

Appendix A – “Using rotational averaging to calculate the response of isotropic and anisotropic bulk samples.”  This is a tutorial on the rotational averaging of vector products, in which one vector is in the laboratory frame and another is in the molecule frame.  Since it was written, the text was improved significantly and was published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2004.

Appendix B – “Schematics for Stark effect controller electronics.”  This describes a box of electronics that I built.

Bibliography – A complete list of thesis references, with full titles.