Below is a photograph of the Raman system as it is on 6/1/03, that we built in the beginning of 2003. It uses a single grating 0.5 m spectrometer to disperse the light and a notch filter to reject the laser line. The light is detected with a back illuminated CCD. We purposefully made the system as simple as possible so that it would be robust, and when it does get misaligned it would be easy to align.
The above pictured system replaces our previous Raman spectrometer, a Dilor OMARS 89, which is shown below. It is a triple grating spectrograph which is capable of detecting phonons as close as 20 cm-1 from the laser line. On the right, you can see the microscope which is coupled to the spectrograph. This allows us to do Raman spectrscopy on samples that have dimensions of only a few microns. A liquid nitrogen cooled CCD detector (barely visible) is on the side opposite to the microscope. Click here to see a quantum view of the Raman scattering process, here for a classical derivation of the effect and here to see some representative spectra. Back home.
This is a picture of the PC that controls the Dilor. Unfortunately it is not uncommon for the PC to be in this condition. This photo offers a good view of the CCD.