The far-infrared/thz beamline at the Australian Synchrotron: Performance & applications

The Australian Synchrotron has built a far-IR/THz beamline. The source for which is collected by a horizontally driven, beam extraction mirror with 58(h) × 17(ν) milliradian of infrared radiation collection[1]. The Australian Synchrotron has a 3GeV storage ring with a horizontal emittance for user operations of 10.4 nm rad[2]. A Brüker IFS125HR Fourier transform (FT) spectrometer capable of a nominal resolution of 0.00096cm^-1 (~30MHz), with a spectral range from 10-10000 cm^-1 has been coupled to the beamline. The infrared radiation has been split between two beamlines. Some of the linearly polarized, bending magnet light is used for the FTIR microscope, while a combination of radially polarized edge radiation and linearly polarized light is used for the high resolution spectrometer. Users have successfully conducted experiments from a wide variety of fields such as atmospheric/astrophysical science, geology, biology and biomedicine.