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.