A Q&A Guide to Novel Techniques

Top content published this week include a feature article on a new innovation called the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a recap of the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS) 2026 show, and a Q&A on measuring nanoparticle formation in indoor air.

In the final part of our conversation with Brandon Boor of Purdue University, he explains the respiratory deposition model his team used to analyze indoor particle exposure.

In the second part of our interview with Brandon Boor of Purdue University, he discusses how his team controls experimental variables during cleaning experiments in order to obtain interpretable data.

An upcoming interview with Ji-Xin Cheng, a Theodore Moustakas Distinguished Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics at Boston University, will highlight his ongoing work in coherent Raman scattering microscopy.

The bulky bench-top NIR spectrometer is quietly being dismantled and rebuilt as a wafer-scale photonic chip, a self-calibrating algorithm, and a sensor small enough to ride in a shirt pocket. What once demanded a grating, a moving mirror, and a climate-controlled lab now fits inside a handheld module, a bioreactor probe, or a drone payload, and it increasingly figures out what it is looking at on its own.

In the first part of a multi-part Q&A, Brandon Boor, the Dr. Margery E. Hoffman Associate Professor in the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University, describes the instrumentation and methodology behind measuring nanoparticle size distributions at the nanocluster scale (1–3 nm) and outlines the technical challenges of acquiring reliable, real-time data at these dimensions.

Reliability, dynamic measurements, artificial intelligence, and real-world applications are reshaping Raman spectroscopy – while Molecular Photonics points toward new translational frontiers.

In this “Tutorial Tuesday” clip, we explore one of the spectroscopic techniques that are used to characterize polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).