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| Vol. 18, No. 36 | July 8, 1999 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 36 | July 8, 1999 |
In the late 1980s, John F. Rabolt, materials science, took a research trip to China's Peking University. It was a trip Rabolt says he will never forget because it may have influenced the future of analytical chemistry research in that country.
At that time, Rabolt was working for the IBM Corp.'s research division. A few months before his Chinese trip, he and fellow East Coast colleague, Bruce Chase of DuPont, had independently developed a new method for noninvasively analyzing materials based on their scattered or Raman spectra. Chinese researchers had heard of the technique, known as Fourier Transform (FT)-Raman spectrscopy, but had not been able to find out much about it.
"Because of political problems, those researchers didn't always have access to current scholarly literature, and they were struggling to update their analytical techniques," Rabolt recalls. Through a series of lectures on FT-Raman spectroscopy, Rabolt says, he described the usefulness of the technique. Then, "using pieces of equipment they had on hand," Rabolt says, he was able to help the Chinese resesarchers assemble a prototype FT-Raman instrument.
"This gave the chemists at Peking University a four-year jump ahead," he says, "since it would have taken them at least that long to access the U.S. scientific literature published that year."
Today, Rabolt estimates that 500 laboratories worldwide make use of FT-Raman spectroscopy. "It was a wonderful experience," he says now of his trip to China.
As a result of such pioneering efforts, Rabolt recently became the first scientist to receive all four Coblentz Society awards for outstanding research in the field of vibrational spectrosopy.
His latest honor, the A.E. Michelson Award, recognizes his contributions to the development of three different techniques: waveguide Raman spectroscopy (WRS), FT-Raman spectroscopy and infrared studies of ultra-thin films. The techniques generate a "fingerprint" of a sample, shedding light on the chemical composition and other structural features of materials, he explains.
The infrared (IR) technique, for instance, exploits the inherent direction of polarized light to reveal how molecules are oriented on a material surface. By analyzing, say, the way these oriented surface molecules interact with liquid-crystal display elements in a notebook computer, Rabolt says, researchers using the IR method are developing less expensive forms of the technology.
Rabolt's current award is dedicated to the memory of Prof. A.E. Michelson (1852-1931), developer of the Michelson interferometer, an instrument for measuring wavelength based on optical interference. Honoring researchers who promote advances in vibrational, molecular, Raman or electronic spectroscopy, the A.E. Michelson Award is sponsored by Bomem, Hartman & Braun through the Coblentz Society, a nonprofit organization which convenes a committee to select a new recipient each year.
Rabolt, who joined the UD faculty in 1996, previously had received three other spectroscopy awards from the group: the Coblentz Award (1985), the Williams-Wright Award (1990) and the Ellis R. Lippincott Award, cosponsored by the Optical Society of America (1993). The A.E. Michelson award consists of symbolic and monetary recognition, as well as a conference symposium in Rabolt's honor, which will take place next March in New Orleans.
Rabolt earned his doctorate in chemical physics from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1974.
-Ginger Pinholster
