Scope of the Workshop
In recent years, infrared microscopy and spectroscopy has greatly benefited from new sources, namely Synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers. Besides mapping characteristic vibrational signatures of molecular species, these new sources provide a tremendous improvement in spatial resolution at high signal to noise. Far-field microanalysis, using Synchrotron Radiation instead of conventional IR sources, exhibits a marked improvement in spatial resolution, about one order of magnitude to ~l (the Rayleigh limit). This has opened up new scientific directions for physicists, biologists, chemists, industrial applications, forensics, and more. Synchrotron Infrared Spectromicroscopy beamlines are currently operational or planned in nearly all synchrotron facilities around the world. Numerous applications to various analytical domains, carried out in all the existing facilities, will be presented and discussed during this workshop.

In addition to far-field spectromicroscopy, near-field optical techniques are looking to push the lateral resolution by another order of magnitude with the help of Free-Electron Lasers. Recent FEL’s are able to deliver the photon flux needed to overcome the very high signal loss required by near-field techniques.

The scope of this workshop is to bring together SR & FEL scientists and synchrotron-IR & FEL-IR users to discuss the trends in these fields, and to promote even more promising applications.

Format
The Workshop will be organized to encourage discussions. Oral presentation will be scheduled for between 20 and 40 minutes including time for questions and answers. A poster session with refreshments will also be scheduled. There will be no parallel sessions.

Attendance
The number of participants will be limited to 100.