Thermo Fisher Scientific held a well attended symposium on the latest technique in spectroscopy in Princeton, NJ on March 18. There were six talks presented of which I could only attend the first four. Presently, I lack enough knowledge in spectroscopy to be dangerous so I was treading water while most people appeared to be swimming comfortably with the subject matter.
I was excited to learn that there is a type of spectroscopy called Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) that allows you to identify material composition of a sample from the X-ray spectrum emitted by the material when it is excited by an electron beam. When EDS is combined with an Scanning Electron Microscopy, you can image a sample such as a nanowire and determine the chemical composition of any spot on the nanowire. It was cool to see an images of a sample like a cross section of a CIGS solar cell and see the chemical composition of the structures within the cell at the same time.
The talks included:
- Microanalysis of Micron-Sized Features in Solar Energy Conversion Devices, by Breno Leite, Ph.D, Thermo Scientific.
- Coupling AFM with FR-IP: Opportunities and Challenges, Christopher M Yip, Ph.D, University of Toronto.
- Combat Wounds: Gaining insight with Vibrational Spectroscopy, Nicole J. Crane, Ph.D, Naval Medical Research Center.
- Applications of IR and Raman in Art Fraud and Authentication, James Martin, Orion Analytical, LLC.
- Infrared and Raman Analysis of Photovoltaic Materials, Jeffrey Hirsch, Ph.D, Thermo Fisher Scientific.
- Deep Ultraviolet Raman spectroscopy combined with advanced statistics is a powerful tool for structual characterization of protein aggregates, Igor K. Lednev, Ph.d, University of Albany, SUNY.