“…under the experimental conditions employed in this study, i.e., bath gas pressures of 40 to 300-Torr N 2 + 02 and reaction times longer than 0.25 ms, vibrational relaxation of IO occurs much more rapidly than does chemical reaction[Daykin and Wine, 1990].Reaction mixtures employed to study (t' represents a time shortly after the laser fired when IO production was complete but little or no IO decay had occurred; t" represents a time after IO removal had gone to completion but before more stable species, destroyed or produced as a result of the laser flash, diffused or flowed out of the detection volume; St represents the signal level at time t, and k5 represents the first-order rate coefficient for the process (R5)IO-• loss by reaction with background impurities and diffusion and/or flow out of the detection zoneRESULTS AND DISCUSSIONAll experiments were carried out at room temperature, 298 + 2 K. Before initiating laser flash photolysis kinetics experiments, preliminary studies were carried out to demonstrate that NO 2, 12, DMS, N 2, and 02 could be mixed and flow through the reaction cell without the occurrence of significant chemical change due to dark reactions. In one experiment, a mixture containing 1 x 1015 NO 2 cm -3 and 1 x 1015 12 cm -3 in 100-torr air was flowed through the system, and both NO 2 and 12 were monitored by UV-visibleUnder the conditions of our experiments, k4[NO 2] >> ks.Todetermine k•, pseudo first-order IO decay rates were measured as a function of [DMS] at constant [NO2].…”