The need for accurate spectroscopic data in the VUV has become particularly
acute with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (Leckrone et al.
1990; Leckrone et al. 1993). Elemental abundance
studies on stars and on the Interstellar Medium require improved transition
probability or oscillator strength (f-value) data. The absorption
method is one of the most accurate methods for relative oscillator strength
measurements on neutral atoms, especially when applied to gas phase samples
in an oven (Blackwell et al. 1979). Although it will be
difficult to match the 1% accuracy of the best experiments on neutral
atoms in ovens, experiments using the absorption method on ions in plasmas
are quite promising. Recently Bergeson et al. (1996b)
described a VUV absorption experiment which has unique capabilities. This
VUV absorption experiment uses the Aladdin storage ring at the Synchrotron
Radiation Center as a continuum source, a hollow cathode discharge (HCD) as
an absorbing sample, and a large (3 m) echelle spectrograph equipped with
a state of the art charge coupled device (CCD) detector array. This
experiment is sensitive, i.e. it can be used to measure small equivalent
widths. Its sensitivity is due to: the high spectral radiance provided by
the storage ring, the high () resolving power provided by the
echelle spectrograph, and the powerful advantages of a detector array in
absorption spectroscopy (Wamsley et al. 1993). The
experiment is broadly applicable to many neutral atoms and atomic ions due
to the use of a HCD as an absorbing sample.
This work is an extension and improvement of the first results
from the high sensitivity absorption experiment at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison (Bergeson et al. 1996b). Although the use
of a HCD as an absorbing sample provides great flexibility for studying
lines from many different metastable lower levels in many atoms and ions,
it does have two minor disadvantages. The lower level populations in the
HCD are not in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), as are lower level
populations in an oven. This minor disadvantage is overcome by using a
larger set of reference lines with accurately known f-values
(Bergeson et al. 1996a) to normalize relative f-value
measurements on pairs of lines from a common lower level. The other minor
disadvantage is due to the fact that ions in the negative glow region of a
HCD often do not have a perfectly Maxwellian velocity distribution.
Diffusive cooling tends to deplete the high energy tail of the Maxwellian
distribution and thus affect the curve of growth. Extensive measurements
in this work of the effects of diffusive cooling of ions in the
negative glow of the HCD allow us to construct a satisfactory curve of
growth for use in data analysis. A satisfactory curve of growth is
generated by assuming a full Voigt profile with an artificially low ion
temperature in some cases. We present the first laboratory measurement of 6
absorption f-values for VUV lines of the
multiplet (#8) of Fe II. These lines have been identified in solar
spectra and have been observed in the ISM using the Goddard High
Resolution Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope (Fawcett
1988; Cardelli & Savage 1995). The absolute scale for
the measurements is determined by work on branching fractions done
previously at Wisconsin & Lund (Bergeson et al. 1994, 1996a),
and by work on radiative lifetimes using the laser-fast beam method
(Biemont et al. 1991; Guo et al. 1992). The
combination of these highly accurate measurements of branching fractions
and radiative lifetimes yields 67 f-values of UV transitions in Fe II; 33
of the f-values are accurate to 5% or better, and 29 more are accurate
to within 10% (Bergeson et al. 1996a). The UV transitions
with small (
) uncertainty serve as the primary reference lines in
this study.