Infra-red microthermometric equipment for fluid inclusion research

Fluid inclusions in some opaque minerals can be studied in transmitted near infrared light using microscopes with special infrared facilities (light source, lenses, objectives) and an infrared sensitive TV camera to transmit the infrared image to a monitor. The spectral range for infrared microscopically observations is limited by the detection capacity of the used infrared sensitive camera. At the moment infrared microscopic studies are restricted to the spectral range up to about 2.5µm (2500 nm) in the near infrared region.

In our lab we use the Olympus BHSM-IR with an infrared sensitive TV camera (Hamamatsu C-2400) to display the infrared image on a monitor. For FI studies long working distance IR objectives with magnifications of 10x, 20x, 50x and 80x are available. The Olympus BHSM-IR microscope can be run with any commercial heating/freezing system. To be able to perform quick cyclic heating and/or freezing runs which is often necessary for watching phase transitions on a monitor screen, the USGS heating/freezing system seems to be the most useful for IR microthermometric investigations.