Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Beer lambert law — where it appears

The rule that light passing through an absorbing sample falls exponentially with the path length and the concentration. It is how absorption is usually measured, by comparing a beam before and after, and it fails when the intensity is high enough to saturate the absorber.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The same absorber, spread evenly and gathered into patches. The fraction of light transmitted by a layer holding a fixed amount of absorber, on a logarithmic axis, against the optical depth it would have if spread evenly, for the absorber spread evenly (solid) and gathered into patches covering 50 per cent and 10 per cent of the area, the rest left clear. At an average optical depth of 2 the even layer transmits 13.5 per cent; with the absorber in patches over half the area, 50.9 per cent; over a tenth, 90.0 per cent — almost all of it through the gaps. The average of e^(−τ) over a layer is never less than e^(−average τ): Jensen's inequality, which holds for any convex function. Beer's law describes a uniform absorber and overstates the attenuation of every other kind.

The pigment that absorbs less for being packed

Dissolve a dye evenly in water and it absorbs a certain fraction of the light passing through. Gather the same dye into grains — the same molecules, the same amount, in the same volume — and it absorbs less. The light has not changed and neither have the molecules. The grains shadow their own insides, and the light that would have been caught by the shaded molecules slips through the gaps between grains instead. The effect is called packaging, and it is why the chlorophyll inside large algae is worth less per molecule than the chlorophyll in small ones, and why an ocean's colour does not say directly how much chlorophyll is in it.

waves · Attenuation Lamp noise that a decay does not notice. 400 simulated measurements of an absorption of 1 × 10⁻⁷ per metre, with a source whose brightness jumps by 5 per cent between shots and a detector with 0.1 per cent noise. Read directly, as transmission through a metre of gas, each measurement scatters by 7 × 10⁻² per metre and the true value is five orders of magnitude below that. Read as a fitted decay from a cavity with 99.99 per cent mirrors, it scatters by 5 × 10⁻⁸, about a million times less. The slope of a logarithm has no information about how bright the pulse started, so a source's noise simply is not in the answer. Most of the method's sensitivity comes from this and only some from the long path.

The absorption measured with a stopwatch

The usual way to measure how much light a gas absorbs is to compare a beam before and after, and a very weak absorption vanishes in the flicker of the lamp. Trap a pulse between two excellent mirrors, and it bounces for ten kilometres inside a tube a metre long, leaking out a little at each bounce. How fast that leak dies measures the gas, and how bright the pulse began does not matter at all. A brightness measurement has become a measurement of time.

optics · Dispersion

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

AbsorptionAbsorption coefficientCavity ring down spectroscopyChlorophyllDielectric mirrorFinesseJensen inequalityOptical cavityOptical depthPackage effectPhytoplanktonShot noise

All concepts