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The extinction law's primary application is in chemical analysis, where it underlies the Beer–Lambert law, commonly called Beer's law. Beer's law states that a beam of visible light passing through a chemical solution of fixed geometry experiences absorption proportional to the solute concentration .
The absorbance of a material that has only one absorbing species also depends on the pathlength and the concentration of the species, according to the Beer–Lambert law =, where ε is the molar absorption coefficient of that material; c is the molar concentration of those species; ℓ is the path length.
The Beer–Lambert law states that there is a logarithmic dependence between the transmission (or transmissivity), T, of light through a substance and the product of the absorption coefficient of the substance, α, and the distance the light travels through the material (i.e. the path length), ℓ.
The roots of the term absorbance are in the Beer–Lambert law.As light moves through a medium, it will become dimmer as it is being "extinguished". Bouguer recognized that this extinction (now often called attenuation) was not linear with distance traveled through the medium, but related by what we now refer to as an exponential function.
The technique makes use of the atomic absorption spectrum of a sample in order to assess the concentration of specific analytes within it. It requires standards with known analyte content to establish the relation between the measured absorbance and the analyte concentration and relies therefore on the Beer–Lambert law.
This may be related to other properties of the object through the Beer–Lambert law. Precise measurements of the absorbance at many wavelengths allow the identification of a substance via absorption spectroscopy, where a sample is illuminated from one side, and the intensity of the light that exits from the sample in every direction is measured.
In physics, the attenuation length or absorption length is the distance λ into a material when the probability has dropped to 1/e that a particle has not been absorbed. ...
When an electromagnetic wave travels through a medium in which it gets attenuated (this is called an "opaque" or "attenuating" medium), it undergoes exponential decay as described by the Beer–Lambert law. However, there are many possible ways to characterize the wave and how quickly it is attenuated.