On the Far Infra Red Excitation of LO Vibrations in Thick Single Crystals

New experiments show that the solution of the complicated problem of Far Infrared (FIR) absorption by crystals of very low symmetry, illuminated at quasi-normal incidence, might have a simple solution, which has been suggested now that a number of spectroscopic studies on monoclinic Triglycine Sulphate (TGS) are available: i) in a first classical approximation where only the strongest bands are considered, the absorption spectrum depends only on the direction of the electric field E of the IR radiation, and Transverse Optic (TO) vibrations are directly excited with electric dipole variations dp parallel to E. ii) in a second approximation looking only at the weakest absorption bands, it depends only on the direction of the wave vector k and Longitudinal Optic (LO) vibrations are excited with dp parallel to k and extinction coefficients 3 orders of magnitude smaller.