The UV/Vis spectrophotometer is an instrument that measures UV and visible light absorbed by a compound. Because the light absorbed by a compound may be used to determine how much of that compound is in a solution, it has many uses in both biology and chemistry.

We have two different kinds of spectrophotometers. The first, a Perkin Elmer Lambda 2 is a computer-controlled, double-beam instrument. This makes it extremely sensitive and accurate, and is a research-grade instrument. This instrument is shared jointly with the Biology department, and is used in many classes both in Biology and Chemistry as well as in many research projects.

The second instrument is an Ocean Optics CHEM-UV Spectrophotometer. The design of this instrument is radically different from the scanning spectrometer. The Ocean Optics machine is a photodiode array machine. In this kind of machine, the entire spectrum can be determined in less than a second, making it a much faster machine for certain kinds of experiments. It is also a much more compact machine, with the bulk of the instrument sitting on a card inside the computer. The only external part is a light source that is the size of the palm of your hand.