Morphology dependent stimulated Raman scattering, MDSRS, is new nonlinear laser Raman technique that has been used to measure the chemical composition of laboratory generated aerosol particles. As the equipment associated with MDSRS is compact and rugged it may be possible to use MDSRS for in situ monitoring of tropo- and stratospheric aerosol chemical content. MDSRS is a new technique though and as such several aspects of the signal generation, i.e. the nonlinear gain process, are not clearly understood. The main focus of this research is the development of MDSRS into a full scale analytic technique. Experiments will be conducted to examine the influence of aerosol size and composition, excitation wavelength, and illumination geometry on MDSRS signal size. The results of these experiments will allow ion of determination of the feasibility of using this new technique for in situ studies of aerosol composition and heterogeneous chemical processes.
