I've acquired a thermal imaging camera, so of course I've been going around imaging everything and observing how mid-IR at ~8-15 um behaves. I even found and purchased a diffraction grating designed for ~10 um light. What I'd love to do is come up with a relatively inexpensive way to show IR absorption bands, and how halogenated gases (e.g. R134a or SF6) contribute much more (on a molecule-by-molecule basis) to the greenhouse effect than other gases - by absorbing wavelengths right in the 8-15 um "window" that the atmosphere is otherwise transparent to.
I was wondering: are there any mid-IR sources besides ordinary thermal blackbodies and burning CO2 lasers operating at many watts? I would love 100 mW CO2 laser, but it seems those don't exist. Anything like an LED would be great, but I can't seem to find anything that is longer than 5 um, and even those tend to be quite expensive.
Does anybody have any ideas? All I can think of is taking a normal blackbody and putting overlapping materials with different IR transmission curves in front of each other (e.g. Si cuts off around 10 um, and then finding something else that transmits starting around 11 would give me a narrower wavelength range than normal. That would produce diffraction lines at different spots than say a similar setup for 12-13 um, etc, with all this against a cold background like a freezer wall. But it would be great if there's something kind of LED-like, or even better a mid-IR laser of reasonably low power.
The ultimate idea is to make and calibrate kind of a crude DIY spectroscope for IR.
I was wondering: are there any mid-IR sources besides ordinary thermal blackbodies and burning CO2 lasers operating at many watts? I would love 100 mW CO2 laser, but it seems those don't exist. Anything like an LED would be great, but I can't seem to find anything that is longer than 5 um, and even those tend to be quite expensive.
Does anybody have any ideas? All I can think of is taking a normal blackbody and putting overlapping materials with different IR transmission curves in front of each other (e.g. Si cuts off around 10 um, and then finding something else that transmits starting around 11 would give me a narrower wavelength range than normal. That would produce diffraction lines at different spots than say a similar setup for 12-13 um, etc, with all this against a cold background like a freezer wall. But it would be great if there's something kind of LED-like, or even better a mid-IR laser of reasonably low power.
The ultimate idea is to make and calibrate kind of a crude DIY spectroscope for IR.