Hello,
When I attempt to obtain an emission spectrum from the my spectrophotometer, the intensity for each wavelength is given in relative (rel) units. What are these values being measured relative to?
thanks.
The unitless intensity values that you see when you measure the emission spectrum of a light source are relative to the degree to which the detector is saturated at a given wavelength. Thus, an intensity value of 1 means that the detector is "pegged", so to speak, at that wavelength. Because the spectrometer intensity values are uncalibrated (and the response is not flat with wavelength) one cannot compare intensities at different wavelengths, making the position of the intensity peak more important than the value of intensity. This is true for all of our spectrometers (Ocean Optics Red Tide, Vernier Spectrometer, and SpectroVis Plus).