Andor Solis S is the spectroscopy-specific edition of the Solis software family, positioned alongside Solis (I) for imaging and Solis (T) for time-resolved measurements. It provides unified control of Andor spectrographs and cameras from a single interface — the spectrograph's grating position, entrance slit width, and turret selection are controlled alongside the camera's exposure time, binning, pre-amplifier gain, and (for EMCCD detectors) electron-multiplying gain — eliminating the workflow friction of managing two separate software packages that do not share state. The software is designed for the data rates and file sizes of modern sCMOS and CCD spectroscopy: a ZL41 Wave 5.5 sCMOS camera running at full frame rate in multi-track mode can generate files exceeding 2 GB in minutes, and Solis S's virtual memory manager handles these without the performance collapse that occurs when a 32-bit application exhausts its address space.

What real-time corrections does Solis S apply during acquisition?

Solis S performs background subtraction, flat-field correction, and transmission/reflectance/absorptance calculations on the live data stream rather than as post-processing steps. For a Raman measurement, this means the user sees the background-subtracted spectrum building up in real time and can judge signal-to-noise ratio and peak development during the acquisition — they do not need to stop, export to a separate analysis package, subtract the dark spectrum, and then discover the integration time was too short. Automatic spectral line identification further reduces the time between acquisition and interpretation. The software supports user-defined background and data display colours, optimised for the low-light or low-contrast monitors often used in laser laboratories where ambient light is kept to a minimum.

How does AndorBasic automate spectroscopy workflows?

AndorBasic is an embedded programming language within Solis S that exposes spectroscopy-specific commands — grating movement, slit-width adjustment, filter-wheel position, shutter state — alongside camera acquisition parameters. A LIBS user can write a script that fires the laser, triggers the spectrograph at a user-defined delay, acquires the spectrum, saves it with a filename encoding the sample ID and shot number, moves the sample stage to the next position, and repeats — all without manual intervention. For multi-track spectroscopy, where up to 256 individual spectral tracks are read out from different sensor rows, AndorBasic can automate the track-definition and binning-region setup that would otherwise require manual configuration for each experiment. Sub-array and asymmetric binning controls (particularly relevant for sCMOS sensors with their split readout architecture) allow the user to trade vertical track height for frame rate — an 8-pixel track height on the ZL41 Wave 5.5 yields approximately 27,000 spectra per second, while a taller track for higher signal-to-noise reduces the rate proportionally.