New Standard For Handheld Detectors

Chemical detectors are used by a wide variety of people, from emergency responders in the field checking for the presence of explosives to pharmaceutical quality-control managers verifying the chemicals going into their production lines. Ensuring that results are comparable from various handheld Raman spectroscopy detectors is the aim of a new standard from the National Institute of Standards & Technology. Detectors from different manufacturers can yield signals with different peak intensities from the same sample. That’s because of variations in the excitation lasers used in the systems. The NIST guide will permit users to calibrate their devices against a series of standard reference materials. “Our goal is that people get the same answer for the same sample on any machine,” says NIST chemist Steven Choquette.