New portable instrument for combined reflectance, time-resolved and steady-state luminescence measurements on works of art

Abstract

In this paper a new compact and portable instrument for combined reflectance, time-resolved and steady-state fluorescence is presented. All the optical parts of the apparatus, carefully described in the text, were chosen after an extensive market survey in order to obtain the best performances coupled with the smallest dimensions. This instrument through the use of a dedicated multiple fiber optic probe, allows the complete photophysical behaviors of investigated materials to be collected from the same point of the analyzed surface. In this way, the resultant instrumental setup is a portable device, usable in situ for non destructive and non invasive diagnostic purposes in the field of cultural heritage. Preliminary results concerning organic dyes characterization, which is the main application of luminescence-based diagnostic techniques in artworks, are presented and compared with those previously obtained using separate devices. Concerning reflectance data, improvements in the deep detectable UV spectral range have been achieved switching from the integrating sphere of the old instrument to bifurcated optical fibers used as probe in the new one. Special attention was devoted to test the instrument capability in order to obtain the true emission spectrum, corrected for the selfabsorption effect, for which good results were found. This particular experimental procedure is strongly recommended, by a diagnostic point of view, to avoid distortions in the instrumental responses, namely the spectral shape and emission maximum wavelength of a fluorophore as function of the color saturation.

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