Raman hyperspectral imaging applied to chemical co-localization in diluted samples of perylene-doped nanotubes

Raman imaging is known to be an efficient tool to localize different chemical species in a sample. Nevertheless, the signature of a minor compound is hard to retrieve in a dense heterogeneous sample. This paper aims at demonstrating that Raman imaging used in a hyperspectral configuration is still a very efficient tool to extract the signature of traces in heterogeneous samples, if the sample is diluted. It opens the way to study chemical co-localization in the case of minor compounds. This possibility is illustrated in the case of perylene-doped single-wall nanotubes (SWNTs). (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.