Optical
Constants
Database
The Optical Constants database (OCdb) is a data repository developed to provide published, peer-reviewed, optical constants of materials relevant to planetary and astrophysical environments to the scientific community for the analysis and interpretation of observational data.
Optical constants are the real and imaginary parts of the complex refractive index, n + ik, of a material, which describe how a material interacts with incident light (transmission, reflection, refraction, absorption, scattering). They are fundamental input parameters for models (e.g. radiative transfer, atmospheric, and reflectance spectral models) that are used to interpret observational data.
The goal of the Optical Constants database is to centralize published optical constants data to facilitate their access by the community. We therefore encourage laboratories generating optical constants to contribute their data in order to increase their visibility and availability.