Scientific grade CCDs operated in cooled, slow-scan cameras offer numerous advantages over single-channel and other multichannel detectors in analytical spectroscopy. Although these advantages have long been recognized and exploited, the applicability of CCDs to analytical spectroscopy has recently been expanded by the development of devices with unique capabilities. Specifically, analytical plasma emission spectroscopy requires a multichannel detector with a very large number of pixels and which has very high resistance to blooming. Analytical Raman spectroscopy is currently undergoing a push to use longer laser excitation wavelengths, and at these longer wavelengths high sensitivity becomes an even greater concern. Two new CCDs and their application in these two fields of analytical spectroscopy are described. Preliminary results obtained with a large format antiblooming CCD used with a custom-built echelle spectrometer are presented, and the capabilities of a red-response- enhanced CCD for tunable near-IR Raman spectroscopy are compared with Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy.
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