Applications of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy in materials science

Because of high chemical, temporal, and spatial resolution, SRS microscopy has emerged as an extremely useful technique for chemical imaging. Even though the design of SRS microscopy was initially aiming at biomedical applications, the materials science community has paid more attention to SRS recently. Properties such as the high speed and high chemical sensitivity make SRS an attractive tool for both the high-throughput characterizations of materials and the detection of fast dynamics in chemical transport and reactions. SRS microscopy has been successfully applied to study numerous topics, such as 2D materials, polymerizations, and energy storage and conversion. In this chapter, the discussion of SRS microscopy will focus on its principles, instrumentation, current applications, and our perspectives on using SRS to explore more interesting topics in the future.