• Question: Do you ever work outside light on the electromagnetic spectrum?

    Asked by rorybaxter to Kate, Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 19 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Oh yes… in fact, I rarely work with light at all!

      I use x-rays to find out structures and elemental contents on a day to day basis, and I have done some special experiments to look at the charges and elements on the surface which also uses x-rays.

      I use gamma rays fairly often to see what kind of iron I have in my compounds and what its surroundings look like – this is the key part of my research project.

      I use ultraviolet AND visual light to look at what kinds of chromium I have (and iron and manganese, but mostly chromium) and we have facilities to use infrared too, but I haven’t used this as I wasn’t sure it would be helpful.

      I even use high energy electron beams in a microscope to create pictures of my materials.

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Yes- I use Infra red, UV and x-rays too, I would love a portable x-ray machine to use on the books!
      The infra red is useful for telling the difference between green pigments in the books, and for Raman it is good for fluorescent crystals, so they glow less or not at all so we can see the spectrum we are after. UV is particularly useful when we want to identify something fluorescent, or see through the visible pigments to what lies beneath. X-rays help me identify the way the molecules in my crystals are packed, but would be very useful in identifying the elements in book pigments too.

    • Photo: Kieren Bradley

      Kieren Bradley answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      A lot of my work is ultra violet, luckily you can shine it on paper and it glows blue so it is much easier to see than Rowena and Kate’s X-rays. I do have to be careful not to damage my eyes by looking at it directly for too long, but luckily for me my safety goggles filter some of it out and it isn’t actually that bright.

    • Photo: Roy Adkin

      Roy Adkin answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Hi Rory,
      Yes I work with UV (Ultra violet) light which has a shorter wavelength than visible light…I shine the UV onto my samples and then the samples absorb the UV and emit in the visible light wavelengths. That’s what fluorescence is.

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