The Confocal Raman Microscope
The Raman technique has been traditionally used by materials scientist, chemists and physicists, recently the increasing applications of the Raman tecnique are vaslty emerging into the biological and medical fields. Raman mapping, microscope and spectroscopy can provide varied and important information on many different sample types, from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals, polymers to minerals. Chemical composition, bonding, structure, phase, localization, size, induced stress and reaction mechanisms can all be studied with the modern Raman instrument.
A Raman microscope begins with a standard optical microscope, and adds an excitation laser, a momochromator, and a sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) detector. The Raman microscope, and in particular confocal Raman microscope, has very high spatial resolution.
Our Raman microscope is a confocal LabRAM® Raman from HORIBA Jobin Yvon. It is equipped with an Olympus BX41 microscope ( 50X and 100X). The laser source is a 532 nm solid diode laser and the CCD detector is a large 1024 pixel chip. The microscope also comes with an external temperature controlled stage (5-50oC) whichk is great for biological sample studies. Two interchangeable gratings (600 and 1800 lines/mm) and several confocal hole apertures can realize variable spectral resolution.
