Title: hole burning
Long Title: IUPAC Gold Book - hole burning
DOI: 10.1351/goldbook.H02834
Status: current

Definition
The photo bleaching of a feature, normally a narrow range, within an inhomogeneous broader absorption or emission band. The holes are produced by the disappearance of resonantly excited molecules as a result of photophysical or photochemical processes. The resulting spectroscopic technique is site-selection spectroscopy.

Related Terms
- bleaching: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/B00681
- photophysical: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/P04647
- spectroscopy: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/S05848

Source
- PAC, 1996, 68, 2223. 'Glossary of terms used in photochemistry (IUPAC Recommendations 1996)' on page 2246 (https://doi.org/10.1351/pac199668122223)

Other Outputs
- html: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/H02834/html
- json: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/H02834/json
- xml: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/H02834/xml

Citation: Citation: 'hole burning' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.H02834
License: The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms.
Collection: If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org .
Disclaimer: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using.
Accessed: 2026-05-18T08:46:01+00:00