Sodium Spectrum

The sodium spectrum is dominated by the bright doublet known as the Sodium D-lines at 588.9950 and 589.5924 nanometers. The line at 589.0 has twice the intensity of the line at 589.6 nm.

Taking the range from 400-700nm as the nominal visible range, the strongest visible line other than the D-lines is the line at 568.8205 which has an intensity about 0.7% of that of the strongest line. All other lines are a factor of two or more fainter than that one, so for most practical purposes, all the light from luminous sodium comes from the D-lines.

The illustration shows the interference pattern formed by the sodium doublet in a Fabry-Perot interferometer.

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