Cost-Effective Spectroscopic Instrumentation for the Physical Chemistry Laboratory

Teaching or developing experiments for an undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory course can be very challenging. Often it is difficult to develop particular experiments because the spectroscopic instrumentation is not readily available within your department or is too expensive to purchase for an undergraduate laboratory experiment. To address these issues, we purchased a series of modular miniature UV–vis fiber-optic spectrometers from Ocean Optics Inc. to conduct undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory experiments. The instrumentation is very modular and can be used for a variety of absorption, emission, or Raman scattering experiments. Instrumentation can also be used in a standard undergraduate instrumental analysis course. The physical chemistry laboratory experiments that we developed with this new instrumentation consist of analyzing the Balmer emission lines of the hydrogen atom, studying nitrogen emission band lines, investigating the absorption spectrum of iodine, and analyzing the Raman spectra of CCl₄, CBr₄, and dry ice.