Symposium on the developments in Raman Imaging

The focus of the 9th Confocal Raman Imaging Symposium was on the application possibilities of high-resolution Raman microscopy in pharmaceutical research as well as materials, geo-, and life sciences.

The keynote lecture by Prof Sebastian Schlücker from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, looked at the basics of Raman spectroscopy and its application in microscopy.

The specific requirements for highly sensitive and diffraction-limited Raman imaging in terms of an optimised microscope setup were highlighted by Dr Olaf Hollricher, WITec Managing Director R&D.

Dr Thomas Dieing, WITec Director Customer Support, underlined in his presentation on the combination of Raman with structural surface imaging, the necessity of a modular instrument platform in order to perform AFM and TrueSurface Microcopy with a single instrument.

Further highlights included an application-related talk by Dr.Thomas Beechem, from Sandia National Laboratories, which discussed the analysis of stress and material interactions between the individual layers of a bi-layer graphene sheet.

Dr Juan Romero from CSIC, Madrid, Spain, talked about the importance of ceramic materials in everyday life as well as high technology while showing various examples of how Raman imaging is beneficial for the characterisation of ceramic materials.

The poster session was commenced by Dr Dieter Fischer, from the Leibnitz Institute for Polymer Research, Dresden, Germany with his presentation on temperature-dependent Raman imaging of polymer blends.

During the dinner talk Prof Fernando Rull from the University of Valladolid, Spain, reported on the Raman spectrometer which will be part of the European ExoMars 2018 mission, pointing out that the instrument design for space applications requires additional evaluative research to be successful.

The main focus of the second symposium day was the operation of the instruments. In the WITec application lab, the attendees were able to see live demos of 3D Raman imaging experiments combined with AFM or topographic Raman Imaging on large samples.