The ability to investigate heterogeneous materials at nanometer scales and far-infrared energies will benefit a wide range of fields, from condensed matter physics to biology.
Scientific studies require tools that match the natural length and energy scales of the phenomena under investigation. For many questions in biology, quantum materials, and electronics, this means nanometer spatial resolution combined with far-infrared energies. For example, scientists might want to study collective electron oscillations in quantum materials for optoelectronic circuits, or the characteristic vibration modes of protein molecules in biological systems.
A recently developed infrared technique—synchrotron infrared nanospectroscopy (SINS)—combines broadband synchrotron light with atomic-force microscopes to enable infrared imaging and spectroscopy at the nanoscale. However, the technique could only be used in a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that excluded far-infrared wavelengths, due to a scarcity of suitable light sources and detectors for that range. In this work, researchers extended SINS to far-infrared wavelengths, opening up a whole new experimental regime.
> Read more on the Advanced Lightsource at Berkeley Lab website
Image: Left: Nanoscale images of SiO2 hole array, obtained using atomic-force microscopy (AFM, top) and synchrotron infrared nanospectroscopy (SINS, bottom), demonstrating SINS contrast between patterned SiO2 and underlying Si substrate with ~30 nm spatial resolution (inset). Scale bar = 200 nm. Right: SINS broadband spectroscopic data for SiO2, taken along dotted line in images at left, showing amplitude (top) and phase (bottom) information from asymmetric Si–O stretching (1200 cm–1) and bending (460 cm–1) modes. The lower-energy bending mode had previously been inaccessible with this technique.