THEORY OF POLARIZATION QUENCHING BY EXCITATION TRANSFER

The several modern theories of concentration quenching of fluorescence polarization (cq/tfp) are in fair qualitative agreement with one another, but differ considerably in their physical and statistical assumptions and in their quantitative predictions of the resonance transfer rate from a given set of data. A critical comparison of the theories of Föster, Weber and Jablonski is made and a new theory on excitation transfer within clusters of molecules is outlined. Certain cq/tfp data on phenol, anthracene, fluorescein and chlorophyll a are discussed and reinterpreted on the basis of the theory. © 1968.