Thursday, December 6, 2012

Terahertz and Art Examination


My Note: The photograph below appears to have Irl Duling pictured on the right hand side, using  an Advanced Photonix, T-Ray 4000
I have worked on Terahertz for Art Examination between 2008-2011, and Terahertz was the main topic of my fellowship in Conservation Science at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Terahertz finds application for Art Examination and Conservation. I was looking through my material on this topic and I found a nice educational video I made two years ago but I never published. I thought could be useful for somebody interested to Terahertz.
Terahertz investigation of a mummy
Among the various applications of Terahertz which we explored during my fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum there was also the examination on an Egyptian mummy. This study lead  to this publication: E. Cortes, A. Cosentino, I. N. Duling, K. Fukunaga, D. T. Mininberg, I. Stuenkel, M. Leona “Investigating the use of terahertz pulsed time domain reflection imaging for the study of fabric layers of an Egyptian mummy,” Journal of the European Optical Society, Rapid publications 6, 11040 (2011).
 It was nice to work with this method since you can do a lot of 2D and 3D imaging. It has application for sure due to its specific advantages over X-ray, but it is still too expensive so it will take time before it can be adopted by conservation industry. Though, future developments will probably make it affordable. Well, hope you enjoy the video!
Thanks go to Zomega and Picometrix, companies which provided the equipment and expertise and to all authors on the paper above who helped me during the great experience which is a fellowship at the Dept of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum.

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