Spectrophotometer

In physics, spectrophotometry is the quantitative study of spectra. It is more specific than the general term electromagnetic spectroscopy in that spectrophotometry deals with visible light, near-ultraviolet, and near-infrared. Also, the term does not cover time-resolved spectroscopic techniques.

Spectrophotometry involves the use of a spectrophotometer. A spectrophotometer is a photometer (a device for measuring light intensity) that can measure intensity as a function of the color, or speaking more generally, the wavelength of light. There are many kinds of spectrophotometers. Among the most important distinctions used to classify them are the wavelengths they work with, the measurement techniques they use, how they acquire a spectrum, and the sources of intensity variation they are designed to measure.

Perhaps the most common application of spectrophotometers is measurement of light absorption, but they can be designed to measure diffuse or specular reflectance. Strictly, even the emission half of a luminescence instrument is a kind of spectrophotometer.

The two major measurement classes are sometimes called single beam and double beam spectrophotometers. A double beam spectrophotometer measures the ratio of the light intensity on two different light paths, and a single beam spectrophotometer measures the absolute light intensity. Although ratio measurements are easier, and generally stabler, single beam instruments have advantages, for instance they can have a larger dynamic range.

The most common spectrophotometers are used in the UV and Visible regions of the spectrum, and some of these instruments also operate into the near-infrared region as well. Spectrophotometers designed for the main infrared region are quite different because of the technical requirements of measurement in that region. One major factor is the type of photosensors that are available for different spectral regions, but infrared measurement is also challenging because virtually everything emits IR light as thermal radiation, especially at wavelengths beyond about 5 μm.

Many spectrophotometers use a monochromator to analyze the spectrum, but there are also spectrophotometers that use arrays of photosensors and, especially in the IR, there are spectrophotometers that use a Fourier transform technique to acquire the spectral information in a techique called FTIR.

The spectrophotometer measures quantitatively what fraction of light passes through a given solution. In a spectrophotometer, a light from a lamp (In a near-IR/VIS/UV spectrophotometer typically a deuterium gas discharge lamp) is guided through a monochromator, which picks light of one particular wavelength out of the continuous spectrum. This light passes through the sample that is being measured. After the sample, the intensity of the remaining light is measured with a photodiode or other light sensor, and the transmittance for this wavelength is then calculated.