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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.
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.
The Beer–Lambert law has implicit assumptions that must be met experimentally for it to apply; otherwise there is a possibility of deviations from the law. [14] For instance, the chemical makeup and physical environment of the sample can alter its extinction coefficient.
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.
In a large scale, one must compute the extinction coefficient using the Beer-Lambert Law A=εLC in which A is the measured absorbance, ε is the slope of the standard curve, L is the length of the cuvette, and C is the concentration being determined. [26]
When using spectrophotometric analysis to determine the concentration of DNA or RNA, the Beer–Lambert law is used to determine unknown concentrations without the need for standard curves. In essence, the Beer Lambert Law makes it possible to relate the amount of light absorbed to the concentration of the absorbing molecule.
In optics and in chemical spectroscopy, this is known as the Beer–Lambert law. In engineering, attenuation is usually measured in units of decibels per unit length of medium (dB/cm, dB/km, etc.) and is represented by the attenuation coefficient of the medium in question. [1]