We demonstrate the applicability of 2-photon Rydberg excitations of nitric oxide (NO) at room temperature in a gas mixture with helium (He) as an optogalvanic gas sensor. The charges created initially from succeeding collisions of excited NO Rydberg molecules with free electrons are measured as a current on metallic electrodes inside a glass cell and amplified using a custom-designed highbandwidth transimpedance amplifier attached to the cell. We find that this gas sensing method is capable of detecting NO concentrations lower than 10 ppm even at atmospheric pressures, currently only limited by the way we prepare the gas dilutions.
For vibrational excitation, the vibrational infinite order sudden approximation was qualitatively correct using an initial j of 0. The agreement was improved using an average over the initial j states of 0, 2, and 4. For vibrational relaxation, reasonable agreement with experiment was achieved only with the initial j average and n̄=n.
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