Phase Plane Method for Room-Temperature Phosphorescence Lifetime Determination of Single and Double Exponential Decays

Abstract

The phase plane (PP) method for evaluation of decay parameters is applied to the determination of room-temperature phosphorescence lifetimes on filter-paper substrates. The commonly used semilogarithmic (SML) method and the phase plane method are compared experimentally. The prominent advantage of the PP method is precision, which in most of the cases evaluated is about one order of magnitude better than that of the semilogarithmic method. The PP method is able to detect double exponential decays where the SML provides a single decay component, and it is not susceptible to the computational failures of the SML method in situations where a high background phosphorescence contribution is found. The PP method is more elaborate than the SML method, but it is computationally simple and is easy to program.