REAL TIME RAMAN QUANTIFICATION WITHOUT A SPECTROMETER

Abstract

Raman spectroscopy is gaining its popularity in biological fields due to its ability to obtain data without altering the sample in anyway. However, there was no method of measuring the concentration of a substance of interest in real time, which can be useful in many biological applications. The conventional spectrometer was taken out and instead I used a lock-in amplifier, which is a device that amplifies signals obtained at a given frequency. This way we manipulated a method to obtain data at 1000 Hz. Moreover, noise at frequencies not equal to 1000 Hz will naturally die out due to no amplification. However, noise obtained from the laser frequencies (auto-fluorescence from sample, random scattering etc.) need to be flattened to avoid amplifying these noises. We have used HPLC grade ethanol and obtained a quantified graph to prove this idea.