The Bartlett PhD Conference 2014: Tiphaine Bardon, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Undercover investigation of documents with terahertz

Archives and libraries can contain documents with pages painted over, glued together as a result of water damage, or extremely brittle and difficult to turn or unfold without damage. Yet, the twofold task of archives is to guarantee that their collections of historical records are preserved and that the information remains accessible and available to the public. Is there any alternative way to provide access to the textual information of these documents without damaging them? The answer might lie in airport security scanners, using terahertz technologies to identify and image drugs and explosives under clothing and through closed bottles. This research explores the following questions:

- if terahertz technologies enable to "see" through clothes, can they enable to "read" through pages of paper or parchment? Are all inks on all paper and parchment sheets readable with this technology, or are there combinations giving better contrast? How deep in a stack of sheets can we uncover inscriptions using terahertz imaging?
- if terahertz technologies enable to identify drugs, can they also identify chemical and physical degradation processes occurring in archival collections? Specifically, can this technology be used to non-invasively differentiate inscriptions written with corrosive inks from those written with inert inks?

This lecture was recorded on 15 April 2014.

Видео The Bartlett PhD Conference 2014: Tiphaine Bardon, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies канала The Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment