Rohit Bhargava

Recent advances in instrumentation have enabled new forms of vibrational chemical imaging, including discrete frequency infrared (DFIR) microscopy and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy. These technologies may represent a fundamental shift in how we approach spectroscopic imaging: rather than collecting full spectra which contain redundant information, measuring a few important spectral frequencies may enable significant gains in speed, throughput, signal to noise ratio, and/or image quality. For infrared microscopy, these advantages may be compounded by High Definition IR microscopy. Here we discuss recent advances in infrared and nonlinear Raman imaging through the lens of 'discrete frequency' approaches, including several examples of applications and critical issues in instrumentation that are likely to be dominating research themes in the near future.