RESOLUTION OF MULTIPLE OVERLAPPING LINES IN THE ANALYSIS OF MOLECULAR-SPECTRA

We discuss two approaches to the treatment of blended lines in a molec ular absorption spectrum. This problem of blended lines is relatively frequent in the dense and complex far-infrared and infrared spectra of methanol. The first technique utilizes an interactive computer line-p rofile analysis routine to resolve the blended features, while the sec ond more directly separates closely adjacent peaks in the spectrum by employing 2f lock-in detection. In principle, both techniques can be a pplied to any spectrum where line overlapping occurs and in most cases make overlapped lines separable for analysis with practically the sam e precision as that for isolated lines. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.