 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Spectral width" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Intelecommunications,spectral width is the width of aspectral band, i.e., the range of wavelengths or frequencies over which the magnitude of allspectral components is significant, i.e., equal to or greater than a specified fraction of the largest magnitude.
Infiber-optic communication applications, the usual method of specifying spectral width is thefull width at half maximum (FWHM). This is the same convention used inbandwidth, defined as the frequency range where power drops by less than half (at most −3dB).
The FWHM method may be difficult to apply when the spectrum has a complex shape. Another method of specifying spectral width is a special case ofroot-mean-square deviation where the independent variable is wavelength, λ, andf (λ) is a suitable radiometric quantity.
Therelative spectral width, Δλ/λ, is frequently used where Δλ is obtained according to note 1, and λ is the center wavelength.
This article incorporatespublic domain material fromFederal Standard 1037C.General Services Administration. Archived fromthe original on 2022-01-22. (in support ofMIL-STD-188). | This article related totelecommunications is astub. You can help Wikipedia byadding missing information. |