Ordinary fiber-optic bundles provide inhomogeneous illumination to the entrance slits of spectrometers. When the source illumination of the fiber-optic bundle changes, the distribution of illumination to the spectrometer changes. The change in illumination can shift spectral features by nanometers! This wavelength noise can dominate all other noise sources in sensitive spectrophotometry. Array detectors are especially vulnerable to this type of noise!

InTek CertiLight Fiber bundles each include an InTek's UniLight beam homogenizer. This patent-pending optic results in over 200 times more uniformity and lower wavelength shift with no loss of light! CertiLight fiber optic bundles make impossible measurements possible!

Typically, fibers at the entrance of a spectrometer are aligned in a rectangular bundle. As shown, not illuminating one fiber shifts the illumination center by 20 microns. At a typical 1 [nm/mm] dispersion, the spectrometer would record a 0.02 [nm] wavelength shift! If this occurs on the edge of a 3 AU/10 [nm] absorbance, a 600 [uAU] noise results!

In a spectrometer, the entrance slit (shown as solid lines) is imaged onto the exit slit (shown as dotted lines). These images are never perfectly aligned. As non-uniform illumination shifts the center of illumination up and down, the apparent wavelength shifts left and right! Array spectrographs are the worst case as each pixel has a different tilt!

Light homogenization has long been recognized as important to accurate measurements. However the typical integrating sphere used for homogenization reduces intensity by 150 times. The UniLight homogenizer in each CertiLight fiber optic bundle looses less than 20% of the incident light. A UniLight homogenizer is over 120 times more efficient than an integrating sphere, and the UniLight homogenizer preserves f/#

Have you ever melted a fiber bundle? A 30-watt tungsten lamp can be focussed to make the epoxy in an old-technology fiber bundle ooze and smoke. The ferrules and fibers reflect the heat in an average bundle, but the epoxy absorbs the light. The proprietary high-temperature epoxy used in CertiLight fiber bundles reflects over 95% of the incident energy. Heating is lower, temperature is lower, and the bundle survives where others fail. CertiLight fiber bundles can handle up to 10 times the power of old technology bundles.

Each CertiLight fiber bundle is tested for transmission and numerical aperture as a function of wavelength before it leaves the factory. The results are included on disk in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You can confidently use these results to predict the performance of your CertiLight fiber bundle in any application. No longer do you need to try to extract numbers from a best-case graph. InTek delivers the numbers to you.

Old technology bifurcated fiber bundles can have almost 1% cross talk between the illumination and detection channels. The bundling of the illumination and detection fibers results in microscopic scratches. Because of these scratches, back reflections in the illumination channel propagate through the epoxy and get captured by the detection fibers. The cross talk signal can be the dominant signal in fiber-based spectrophotometry, fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy. CertiLight bifurcated bundles eliminate this cross talk! The proprietary epoxy used in CertiLight bifurcated fiber bundles absorbs the back propagation before it can be coupled into the detection channel. CertiLight bifurcated fiber bundles have one thousand times lower stray light!