As the nature of the threat landscape evolves, warfighters require capabilities that can be handheld and are low in weight and power so they can quickly detect and identify chemical threats. State-of-the-art microelectronic fabrication tools can produce low-cost photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that contain not only the sensing trenches for Waveguide-Enhanced Raman spectroscopy (WERS), but also other on-chip optical components such as filters and couplers. Raman spectroscopy is used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint or signature to identify molecules.
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