We describe an acoustooptic spectrometer and consider the possibilities for using it for actinometric investigation of the kinetics of formation and decay of active species in plasmochemical processes.

An important problem to be solved in developing the technology of plasmochemical processes in microeleetronics is optimization of the processing conditions, including the choice of the reactor coating. In low-pressure reactors, for which the free path length of active species is on the order of the dimensions of the chamber, the equilibrium of the gaseous medium strongly depends on the chemical reactions on the surface [1]. Recently optical emission actinometry has been actively used for investigation of the mechanisms for these reactions and optimization of the reaction conditions. This method was first proposed in [2] and is based on normalization of the emission intensity of the lines from the analyte component to the emission intensity of the line from an inert gas added to the discharge in small amounts. If the emitting states of the actinometer atoms are obtained by direct electron-impact excitation from the ground state, then the ratio of the intensities of the selected spectral lines of the analyte component Ix and the actinometer I,,~ does not depend on the electron density. In this case: tx k~ txl =~ txl