Cuvette
small tube-like container with straight sides and a circular or square cross section
In laboratories, a cuvette (French: cuvette, lit. 'little vessel') is a small tube-like container with straight sides and a circular or square cross-section. It is sealed at one end, and made of a clear, transparent material such as plastic, glass, or fused quartz. Cuvettes are designed to hold samples for spectroscopic measurement, where a beam of light is passed through the sample within the cuvette to measure the absorbance, transmittance, fluorescence intensity, fluorescence polarization, or fluorescence lifetime of the sample. This measurement is done with a spectrophotometer.
Overview
Traditional ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy or fluorescence spectroscopy uses samples that are liquid. Often the sample is a solution, with the substance of interest dissolved within. The sample is placed in a cuvette and the cuvette is placed in a spectrophotometer for testing. The cuvette can be made of any material that is transparent in the range of wavelengths used in the test.
The smallest cuvettes can hold 70 microliters, while the largest can hold 2.5 milliliters or more. The width determines the length of the light path through the sample, which affects the calculation of the absorbance value.
“Cuvette” enters the record as small tube-like container with straight sides and a circular or square cross section. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cuvette, small and tube-like can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Cuvette” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cuvette, small and tube-like provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q427601. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cuvette” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.