Selection of modulation frequency of FT-IR equipped with an MCT detector for thin-film analysis

Optimal modulation frequency (scan rate) of an FT-IR equipped with a mercury–cadmium–telluride (MCT) detector has been investigated for obtaining high quality spectra of a monolayer-level thin film. Since an MCT detector is a semiconductor light device, it does not respond to modulation frequency significantly in comparison to a pyroelectric detector. A very thin film, however, requires high-throughput measurements to have high signal-to-noise ratio. In this study, a balance of throughput and measurement time has been investigated by varying modulation frequency by using two spectrometers that have different sampling frequencies. In this study, the stability of the baseline of absorbance spectra was also investigated depending on modulation frequencies, which suggested that 60 kHz was most suitable for quantitatively reliable transmission measurements of Langmuir–Blodgett films.