I've been working with QCL for 10 years now I think
In 2010 I started as a diploma student
and then I continued to work with QCLs as a PhD student
and I focused on QCL microscopy.
I was one of the more busy PhD students
I worked on every holidy, on every day of the week
and before I met my wife I was working 24/7.
I saw a great potential in the technology
and back then it was really
really exciting and new
to have a lab with QCLs / tunable QCLs
and then I had a comparable measurement with my QCL microscope prototype
and after a few minutes I had 100.000 spectra or more
I don't know how many.
And I was just ...
I was blown away by it - really!
because I looked at the spectra and they looked much better than I expected.
I started a start-up company and kept working on the technology
added new designs and built a new prototype
and Bruker was interested in the technology and I joined Bruker in 2018
So ever since then I am head of the laser spectroscopy group
Well for me really it's a completely new way of working
Because now I am surrounded by a team with
much experience in spectroscopy
much experience in just product development.
And, really, before I had those engineers on my side
I was focusing on some little details, spending hours, weeks
a lot of time and then I joined Bruker and they solve it
in just one meeting
and then we focus on something completely different
that I wasn't even aware of.
Some people here are just really good at their job.
For the HYPERION II the thing stands out is that you
have the free choice to do whatever you want.
you can choose QCL imaging and stick with QCL only
or you can do FT-IR measurements.
But to me it makes sense to combine both techniques
because if you are doing FT-IR imaging and
all you do afterwards is
integrating over one vibrational band
you could just only measure that spectral range, right?
and not invest the time in collecting all the data points
at all the different wavenumbers you are not even looking at.
So, that's not what you want to do with FT-IR
but if you want a full spectrum in every pixel of your image
FT-IR is the way to go because it records full spectra really efficiently.
When picking up such a new technology you have to be critical about it
and really see what it can do and what it can't do
and since FT-IR is well established, it
does not hurt to have this as a gold standard and compare
the QCL results with FT-IR.
If we combine both techniques into one instrument
They user can choose to use QCL microscopy or FT-IR microscopy
depending on the experiment he wants to conduct and
by doing so if he's clever and chooses the
right combination of both techniques
he can save a lot of time and can be really efficient.
And switching between QCL and FT-IR for example is
no rocket science, it's just a simple click of a button and you switch the modes.
So, you have full freedom to do whatever you want to do.
The main challenge when using a QCL for
chemical imaging is the coherence of the radiation.
So the first thing you will notice when you start working in the field
if you use a QCL for chemical imaging the spectra look different
from what you would expect when you compare it to FT-IR
And this is caused by coherence artefacts
You have fringes all over the place in your images
and interference in your spectra
and this is generally considered a problem
because you cannot tell apart the information
in the spectra that is resulting from interferences
and the information that's resulting from the absorbance in your sample.
We removed the coherence
in such an efficient way that you wouldn't notice
the mechanism being active at all.
If everybody knew what it's capable of, I imagine that some people
see some value in it for their applications and get their work done quicker.
And hopefully,
many of them will enjoy working with the HYPERION II afterwards.