THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSITIVE NEAR-IR RAMAN SYSTEM

This paper describes the development of a highly sensitive near-IR laser Raman system which has been designed and built in our laboratory. The system comprises both a micro and macro sample handling facility. The approach that we have adopted uses a conventional spectrograph with a charge coupled device detector and optics optimized for the 700-1000 nm spectral region. The laser source is a tunable titanium sapphire laser which provides intense radiation in the 700-900 nm spectral region. We show that the spatial resolution and spectral sensitivity that can be obtained with the microscope attachment are excellent. A comparison between data obtained from our system and that from an FT-Raman system is given.