Besides, most of the FTIR systems use an internal thermal (Globar™) IR source. One of the main reasons for the lack of imaging capabilities is the lack of sensor technology that can detect intensity variations over the entire range 3–20 μm. Most of the commercially available FTIR systems can measure the absorption spectrum of the samples, but cannot obtain the spatio-spectral image. The preliminary results are promising to develop multimodal imaging capabilities at the IRM beamline of the Australian Synchrotron.įourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has become one of the widely used molecular fingerprinting method over the years providing structural, functional and compositional information of biochemical samples. A rapid phase-retrieval algorithm was applied to the recorded intensity distributions to reconstruct the phase information. The diffracted light from the samples was captured using a NIR sensitive lensless camera. In this study, a pinhole was aligned with one of the lobes of the fork shaped beam and the Airy diffraction pattern was used to illuminate biochemical samples. For intensity imaging, the fork shaped beam is usually tightly focused to a point on the sample plane followed by a pixel-by-pixel scanning approach to record the image.

The resulting beam configuration makes any imaging task challenging. The synchrotron-IR beam at the Australian Synchrotron IRM beamline has a unique fork shaped intensity distribution as a result of the gold coated extraction mirror shape, which includes a central slit for rejection of the intense X-ray beam. Phase imaging of biochemical samples has been demonstrated for the first time at the Infrared Microspectroscopy (IRM) beamline of the Australian Synchrotron using the usually discarded near-IR (NIR) region of the synchrotron-IR beam.

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