Light-Scattering and the Hydrogen Spectrum

Abstract

IN an important paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for January, Raman and Krishnan give an account of their researches on the production of new radiations by light-scattering. In 1928 they announced the discovery that when a transparent medium is irradiated by monochromatic light the radiations scattered by the molecules contain spectral lines of modified frequencies. The difference between the incident and the scattered frequencies corresponds to a characteristic infra-red frequency of the molecule. Such new lines are clearly shown in the beautiful spectrograms which illustrate their paper. The authors direct attention to the usefulness of this phenomenon as a substitute for infra-red spectroscopy.