Use of ordinary green laser could bring Raman spectroscopy into the wider world

With potential uses ranging from drugs to explosives detection, the new Raman Spectrometer being presented at the Optical Society of America’s  “Frontiers in Optics” meeting next week is an exciting step towards making such powerful spectroscopic techniques more widely available.

A Raman spectrometer fires light at a chemical sample and uses extremely sensitive detectors to detect slight increases or decreases in the wavelength of the scattered light, caused by the unique vibrational  and rotational modes of the molecule. Despite the minute chance of this scattering occurring and associated difficulties with detecting the scattered radiation, it is often possible to deduce the precise chemical composition of the sample.

The innovation behind this most recent design is the use of a commercial green laser pointer which is low-cost and low-power, yet effective at detecting the weak Raman signal due to it’s relatively short wavelength. A further improvement on the cumbersome Raman equipment currently used in the lab is the ability of this new device to first scan the entire sample optically to locate particles of interest.

The effective yet compact nature of this new spectrometer will make it an attractive prospect for commercial investment:  Ilana Bar, a researcher with the Department of Physics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, hopes to see it used in “detection of different compounds and for forensic examination of objects that are contaminated with drugs, explosives, and particularly explosive residues on latent fingerprints.”