INFRARED SYNCHROTRON RADIATION INSTRUMENTATION AND APPLICATIONS

Infrared synchrotron radiation (IRSR) in the wavelength range from 1-mu-m to approximately 1 cm has now been used quite extensively both in Japan at UVSOR, Okasaki and in the United States at the NSLS, Brookhaven, following an earlier program at the first infrared beamline at Daresbury in England. Elsewhere around the world, several new beamlines are under construction or planned-including a new facility at Daresbury (UK), and those at Lund (Sweden), SuperACO (France), ADONE (Italy), and the ALS (USA). The use of IRSR poses many new challenges, none the least of which is the fact that the radiation covers four decades of energy and is also very divergent and subject to diffraction. However the advantages are particularly significant due to the 1000-fold increase in brightness available over conventional sources in a region where detectors become a limiting factor. In addition, IRSR is also highly spatially coherent allowing the possibility of a new class of interferometers based on wave front division. We will discuss this and other instrumentation issues as they critically relate to experiments. The applications discussed will be in the areas of surface vibrational spectroscopy, both in ultrahigh vacuum and in electrochemical cells, and in areas which use the pulsed nature of the source both for fast response studies and for pump-probe studies.