Spectrograph detects chemical agents

Pair Technologies, a start-up company established by Delaware University researchers and a former DuPont scientist, is preparing to commercialise a high-precision detector - a planar-array infrared spectrograph - that can identify biological and chemical agents in solids, liquids and gases present at low levels in less than a second.

John Rabolt, a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Delaware University, and his students invented and patented the technology in 2001. Rabolt and Bruce Chase, who recently retired from DuPont as a research chemist, founded the company in 2005.

Spectroscopy is a technique for measuring the concentration or amount of a given material by measuring how well that material absorbs or transmits light. But while it would take the current technology - a Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectrograph - tens of minutes to chemically identify the petroleum in a major oil spill, for example, Pair Technologies' instrument could provide the molecular fingerprint in one second or less, Rabolt said.