November Monthly Meeting

Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh October Meeting

TECHNOLOGY FORUM – 5:30PM
Dr.

Joseph Porreca, D.C.

“Are you Tired or Toxic?”
Dr. Joseph Porreca will be discussing the five factors that

are most responsible for damaging our health and causing us to age prematurely.

TECHNICAL PROGRAM – 8:15 PM
Dr. Peter Griffiths, Professor Emertius,

Dept. of Chemistry, University of Idaho

“Surface‐Enhanced Infrared Absorption: Mechanism and Applications”
Since the first report of surface-enhanced Infrared absorption (SEIRA) by Hartstein et al. in 1980, many practitioners have

attributed the enhancement to a similar mechanism to the electromagnetic mechanism of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). In this talk I will attempt to summarize several of the theories that ascribe SEIRA both to

plasmonic and non-plasmonic mechanisms. The observation that SEIRA enhancements are very similar for all metals and that the bandshapes in SEIRA spectra become distorted when the percolation limit is exceeded mitigate strongly against a plasmonic mechanism. In practice, SEIRA spectra can be accurately modeled using the appropriate form of effective medium theory. Several applications of SEIRA that have been developed in the speaker’s lab and those of others will be described at the end of this talk.