Special Issues-08-01-2014

Law enforcement relies upon "schedules" or lists of controlled substances. In an attempt to circumvent the law, clandestine laboratories produce synthetic designer drugs that are chemically related to a controlled substance, but are different enough to raise legal issues with prosecution.

Counterfeit and illicit tobacco may contain potentially toxic organic impurities that result in adverse health effects to the consumer. The aim of this work was to investigate the feasibility of the identification of organic impurities in counterfeit or illicit tobacco using attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FT-IR) spectroscopy.

The mechanical properties of polymer films such as tensile strength and resistance to tearing depend strongly on the orientation of the polymer chains. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy can be used to measure the degree of orientation both within the plane of the film and normal to it.

Resonance-enhanced atomic force microscopy (AFM)–infrared (IR) is a new technique that couples an atomic force microscope with a pulsed tunable IR laser source to provide high spatial resolution chemical analysis of samples as thin as a monolayer. The AFM probe tip acts as a small local detector of the thermal expansion of the sample caused by the absorption of the monochromatic IR radiation.

Click the title above to open the Spectroscopy August 2014 FT-IR Technology Supplement, Vol 29 No s8, in an interactive PDF format.