Sodium vapor lamp

A sodium-vapor lamp is a gas-discharge lamp that uses sodium in an excited state to produce light at a characteristic wavelength near 589 nm.

There are two varieties of such lamps: low pressure and high pressure. Low-pressure sodium lamps are highly efficient electrical light sources, but their yellow light restricts applications to outdoor lighting such as street lamps. High-pressure sodium lamps produce a broader spectrum of light than the low-pressure lamps, but they still have poorer color rendering than other types of lamps. Low-pressure sodium lamps only give monochromatic yellow light and so inhibit color vision at night.

Low-pressure sodium (LPS) lamps have a borosilicate glass gas discharge tube (arc tube) containing solid sodium, a small amount of neon, and argon gas in a Penning mixture to start the gas discharge. The discharge tube may be linear (SLI lamp) or U-shaped. When the lamp is first started, it emits a dim red/pink light to warm the sodium metal; within a few minutes as the sodium metal vaporizes, the emission becomes the common bright yellow. These lamps produce a virtually monochromatic light averaging a 589.3 nm wavelength (actually two dominant spectral lines very close together at 589.0 and 589.6 nm). The colors of objects illuminated by only this narrow bandwidth are difficult to distinguish.

LPS lamps have an outer glass vacuum envelope around the inner discharge tube for thermal insulation, which improves their efficiency. Earlier LPS lamps had a detachable dewar jacket (SO lamps). Lamps with a permanent vacuum envelope (SOI lamps) were developed to improve thermal insulation. Further improvement was attained by coating the glass envelope with an infrared reflecting layer of indium tin oxide, resulting in SOX lamps.

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