Investigation into the use of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for organic dye analysis

In art conservation, color is essential to understanding a society's culture and history-as an indicator of beauty, status, religion, and more-but has a tendency to fade and diminish over time. Analytical techniques, particularly that of pigment identification, can reveal the artifact's original color and appearance and give new insights to an artist's intentions, techniques, date of creation, and more. However, most identification procedures are invasive and destroy the samples in the process. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has recently been identified as a technique that is minimally invasive and also solves the issue of fluorescence that is found in many other techniques. In this paper, a specific SERS procedure has been developed for the identification of yellow organic dyes from 18th century Japanese Woodblock prints. Several SERS spectra of nine dyes both in solution and applied on artist paper have also been documented in hopes of assisting with pigment identification in the future.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Lin, Sally, S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jeffrey C. Grossman and Nicola Ferralis.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98657

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/98657