Application of Micro-Raman and FT - IR Spectroscopy in Forensic Analysis of Questioned Documents

The majority of questioned documents to be examined consist of handwritten, typed or printed information on paper, and therefore, a sizeable part of the document examiner’s work should be the examination of the paper itself. There are two types of paper examination, destructive and non-destructive. The purpose of the nondestructive examination should be to find out as much as possible about the paper characteristics, which will enable the examiner to make a decision about its authenticity, or relationship with other documents, without affecting the document for any other type of examinations to follow. All Raman and infrared analysis is nondestructive. Raman and infrared spectroscopy are two complementary spectroscopic techniques that can produce fast and efficient analysis of paper of questioned documents. In this study the use of FTIR and Raman spectroscopy to differentiate paper samples was investigated.