Nanoscale infrared spectroscopy

In the early days of scanning probe microscopy, researchers and instrumentation developers were often postulating about the future and, perhaps one day, the advent of the “lab-on-a-tip.” While the technology has seen the development of highly spatially resolved topography imaging coupled to a series of different physical measurements, it is only recently that is has been possible to perform chemical characterization measurements with infrared spectroscopy on the nanoscale. The enabling technique is known as nanoIR™.