Press Releases | August 25, 2021

Towards the elucidation of the origin of absorption spectra and the development of materials with new functions

The collaborative research team formed by the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS) and the Department of Applied Chemistry and Life Science of Toyohashi University of Technology and Osaka Institute of Technology employed terahertz-waves, located in the gap between radio-waves and light-waves, as observation probes, and conducted broadband terahertz (THz) spectroscopy analysis on polylactide (PLA) with different polymer crystal structures. As a result, differences in higher-order structure, which are hard to reveal through conventional methods such as X-ray diffraction, were successfully detected with high precision from differences in THz absorption peaks. This achievement suggests that terahertz-waves have the potential to enable the detection of differences in the complex higher-order structures of PLAs and other biomass-based plastics.

The results of this research were published online on Materials Advances of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the June 2 and selected as an Inside Back Cover in the July 21.

[Article URL] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/MA/D1MA00195G
[Cover URL] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/journals/journalissues/ma#!issueid=ma002014

Full text: Terahertz-waves provide a new method to analyze biomass-based plastic
TUT website: Press release