Re: Question: Optical properties of polymers

The beauty of measurement is that you can explore those details within the
limit of your instruments. Vary the power over a few decades; for instance
from microwatt to a watt or so. Stay below the non-linear region. Use an
objective if necessary to collect as much transmitted light as possible. For
practical systems this is as good as anything. Even for optical data
transmission, 3rd or 4th order accuracy is not important. Off course you can
do some modeling to discriminate the higher order effects.

BTW, ordinary polymer does not fluoresce. If you have a fluorescing polymer,
you'll need to pump it and then separate the pump to obtain the material
char.

Cheers

"Johannes Swartling" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> [top posting corrected]
>
> > If you have the way, make a quick measurement for yourself. It is easy
to
> > measure the transmittance. And then you can compute attenuation from the
> I0
> > = I exp(alpha.x) etc.
>
> At UV wavelengths you probably have quite a lot of scattering and quite a
> lot of fluorescence from the polymer, which makes it non-trivial to
measure
> transmittance in a well-defined way.
>
> Johannes
>
>