Historical Background of Raman Spectroscopy

In 1928, when Sir Chandrasekhra Venkata Raman discovered the phenomenon that bears his name, only crude instrumentation was available. Sir Raman used sunlight as the source and a telescope as the collector the detector was his eyes. That such a feeble phenomenon as the Raman scattering was detected was indeed remarkable. 

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Ham and Walsh (7), who described the use of microwave-powered helium, mercury, sodium, rubidium and potassium lamps. Stammreich (8-12) also examined the practicality of using helium, argon, rubidium and cesium lamps for colored materials. In 1962 laser sources were developed for use with Raman spectroscopy (13). Eventually, the Ar+ (351.1-514.5 nm) and the Kr+ (337.4-676.4 nm) lasers became available, and more recently the Nd-YAG laser (1,064 nm) has been used for Raman spectroscopy (see Chapter 2, Section 2.2). 

These developments in Raman instrumentation brought commercial Raman instruments to the present state of the art of Raman measurements. Now, Raman spectra can also be obtained by Fourier transform (FT) spectroscopy. FT-Raman instruments are being sold by all Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) instrument makers, either as interfaced units to the FT-IR spectrometer or as dedicated FT-Raman instruments. 

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