Spectroscopy-12-01-2009

It has certainly been a long 12 months. With the economic recession, the housing crisis, and high unemployment dominating the news and impacting the spectroscopy marketplace in 2009, it is easy to see why many readers will not be sorry to see the end of 2009, and why they will be all too happy to welcome in 2010.

Getting the best business value from a spectrometer requires knowledge of the instrument and its operating abilities, any attachments, the sample including sampling procedure and presentation, and the software. All of these elements must be pulled together by a skilled and knowledgeable spectroscopist. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in many organizations.

Group theory is the field of mathematics that includes, among other things, the treatment of symmetry. Well, it turns out that molecules have symmetry, so group theoretical principles can be applied to molecules. Because spectroscopy uses light to probe the properties of molecules, it might not be surprising that group theory has some application to spectroscopy. Here, we start a multipart discussion of symmetry and group theory.

Fourier transform–near infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy is one of a number of molecular spectroscopy techniques that are already used for online process analysis across a number of industries, but are still seeing significant growth in demand. FT-NIR technology has a number of inherent advantages for online analysis.

Spectroscopy presents its annual index of authors and articles as a resource for readers and researchers.

Click the title above to open the Spectroscopy December 2009 regular issue, Vol 24 No 12, in an interactive PDF format.