Spectroscopy of Rocks and Minerals, and Principles of Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is the study of light as a function of wavelength that has been emitted, reflected, or scattered from a solid, liquid, or gas. In this chapter I discuss primarily the spectroscopy of minerals, but the principles apply to any material. No single chapter can cover this topic adequately, and one could argue, not even a single book. Thus, in some ways, this chapter may fall short of some reader’s expectations. This chapter constitutes an overview of what is already known (some of which may be covered better in other reviews) and some of the practical lessons of spectroscopy, some of which have been in use by spectroscopists as common knowledge but have not necessarily been published previously in detail. See Farmer (1974), Adams (1975), Hunt (1977, 1982), Clark and Roush (1984), Clark et al. (1990a), Gaffey et al. (1993), Salisbury (1993), and references in those papers for more details.