Georgia Tech professor David Citrin is shown with images produced by a terahertz imaging technique. Researchers studied a 17th century painting using a terahertz reflectometry technique to analyze individual paint layers.(Credit: John Toon, Georgia Tech)
Georgia Tech professor David Citrin is shown with images produced by a terahertz imaging technique. Researchers studied a 17th century painting using a terahertz reflectometry technique to analyze individual paint layers.(Credit: John Toon, Georgia Tech)

The paper, "Global mapping of stratigraphy of an old-master painting using sparsity-based terahertz reflectometry," is the sixth most read physics paper (out of more than 3,000) in 2017 in the Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports.

The paper, "Global mapping of stratigraphy of an old-master painting using sparsity-based terahertz reflectometry," is the sixth most read physics paper (out of more than 3,000) in 2017 in the Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports.

The paper, written by Alexandre Locquet and David Citrin, reveals the stratigraphy of the paint layers employed by 17th century artist Sassoferrato in an oil painting on canvas painting depicting the Madonna. Locquet and Citrin used a novel technique based on the combination of terahertz imaging and signal processing. This project has received considerable attention from the international press, as listed at http://photonics.georgiatech-metz.fr/node/33

The Photonics and Terahertz group at Georgia Tech-Lorraine and Georgia Tech's Atlanta campus is led by Citrin, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Locquet, a researcher at Unité Mixte Internationale 2958 Georgia Tech-CNRS located at GTL. Citrin and Locquet commended Junliang Dong, their former Ph.D. student, for the hard work and valuable insights that he contributed to this project. They also acknowledged the Musée de La Cour d'Or, located in Metz, France, for lending the painting.