Abstract:

Authentication of Traditional Chinese medicinal (TCM) materials—verifying their authenticity, geographical origin, age, and adulterants—serves as a crucial step and reliable means to ensure herb quality and maintain therapeutic efficacy. Currently, traditional authentication methods for medicinal materials is often insufficient to meet the demands for precise quality control. Terahertz technology, with its advantages such as requiring no complex sample pretreatment and enabling rapid detection, shows great potential in TCM materials authentication. The technology offers unique benefits in analyzing the physicochemical properties of medicinal herbs (e.g., component composition), which can reflect the herb quality and aid in their authentication. In this paper, we review the progress in the application of terahertz technology for authenticating TCM materials and prospects its development in the field.in the authentication of traditional Chinese medicinal materials and prospects its development in the field of traditional Chinese medicine.

Key words:

Terahertz technology, Chinese medicinal materials, spectroscopy, authentication