The Future of Portable Spectroscopy

My article with this title appeared in ‘The Anniversary Issue’ of Spectroscopy, July 2020.

Spectroscopy, Spectroscopy-07-01-2020, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page Number: 12–14

The Future of Portable Spectroscopy

Portable spectroscopic instruments have not had significant visibility within the scientific community compared with, for instance, the current generation of high-performance laboratory mass spectrometers.

Portable spectroscopic instruments have not had significant visibility within the scientific community compared with, for instance, the current generation of high-performance laboratory mass spectrometers. This is attributable to a number of reasons, including their very applied (as opposed to research) nature, resulting in few publications in the refereed literature, and their predominant use by non-scientists. The numbers of these instruments deployed today can therefore come as a surprise. For instance, as early as the 1990s, more than 60,000 ion mobility spectrometers (IMS) were deployed worldwide. Cumulative handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) shipments today total more than 100,000, and portable Raman shipments number in the tens of thousands. For these, and some other categories of portable spectrometers, there are more instruments in the field than there are in laboratories.