Highlights from The Authors of the May Special Issue:

"The growth of the commercial handheld spectroscopy market has been driven by economic and security factors, primarily the desire for rapid screening of materials in the field, without the need to take a sample to the laboratory for analysis. Recent experience has shown that this capability for the laboratory to move to the field is transformative – by enabling on-site analyses, it changes the way in which people work. The application areas can be broken down into four broad categories: rapid value determination in the field; rapid safety screening or threat detection; law enforcement and rapid purity or authenticity determination. Potential future areas for optical spectrometers are clinical diagnostics and biomedical applications, especially in “low resource” areas of the world. The nature of these portable and field instruments is that they have very ‘applied’ applications, and comparatively few papers are written on these topics; they are somewhat invisible to the traditional scientific community. However, substantial numbers of these instruments are sold every year, and instrument companies have expended a lot of effort in their development. This special issue of Applied Spectroscopy contains 22 peer-refereed papers across a wide range of analytical techniques, reflecting their authors’ original research, development, and applications of portable spectroscopy. Richard A. Crocombe (PerkinElmer, Waltham, MA) and Mark A. Druy (Galvanic Applied Sciences, Lowell, MA), Associate Editors, Special Edition on Portable Spectroscopy."