Studying Polymer Phase Transitions with Raman Spectroscopy

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).

An upcoming presentation will explore how we can better understand and control nanoparticle morphology is critical for tuning material performance.

Jurgen Popp, Thomas Mayerhofer, and colleagues at Leibniz IPHT and Friedrich Schiller University Jena introduce the Personalized Optical Digital Twin (PODT), a Photonics21 contribution to Europe's Virtual Human Twin ecosystem that connects molecular photonics—Raman blood analysis, coherent Raman tissue imaging, and multimodal endomicroscopy—with longitudinal physiology and clinical data. Drawing on the published multicenter INTELLIGENCE trials, the authors argue that technical feasibility and clinical utility must be evaluated separately as the field moves toward Europe's FP10 research agenda.