Smoke and Mirrors: Ultra-Rapid-Scan FT-IR
Spectrometry
This work began 1995 with the realization that the
susceptibility of step-scan measurements to noise is largely due to very low spectral
multiplexing frequencies. The low modulation frequencies of step-scan operation are a
consequence of the small average mirror velocity. This work represents the opposite
extreme - scanning an interferometer mirror very rapidly to produce interference signals
nearly 1000 times higher in frequency than those used with pyroelectric detectors, and
nearly 1,000,000 times higher than those used in step-scan measurements. The target of
this work is to scan a 4 cm-1 spectrum every 1 ms. It appears that we will
eventually be able to at least double this rate.
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