Role of Beam Foil Spectroscopy in Understanding Basic Plasma Processes on the Sun

Abstract

Beam-Foil spectroscopy(BFS) has proved to be a valuable technique for the determination of radiative lifetimes of excited atomic levels leading to the evaluation of the transition probabilities. The time- resolved nature of the decay process in a collisionless environment is a unique characterstic of the beam-foil light source. The relevance of BFS to astrophysics comes from the importance of radiative transition probabilities in the quantitative analysis of optical spectra. Stellar abundances are obtained from the intensity of a spectral line which essentially is a product of the abundance of the element in the source and the probability of the transition. Thus the evaluation of accurate values of transition probabilities contribute significantly to stellar abundance analysis.