Slit Width - Agilent Technologies 1260 User Manual

6
How to optimize the Detector
Optimizing for Sensitivity, Selectivity, Linearity and Dispersion

Slit Width

The detector has a variable slit at the entrance of the spectrograph. This is an
effective tool to adapt the detector to changing demand of different analytical
problems.
A narrow slit provides spectral resolution for analytes with very fine
structures in the absorbance spectrum. An example of such a spectrum is
benzene. The five main absorbance bands (fingers) are only 2.5 nm wide and
just 6 nm apart from each other.
Figure 56
A wide slit uses more of the light shining through the flow cell. This gives
lower baseline noise as shown in
126
Benzene at 1, 4 and 16 nm slit width (principle)
Figure 57 on page 127.
Agilent 1260 Infinity DAD and MWD User Manual