A three-way array model for resolving multicomponent fluorescent mixtures (Q1207190)

The lifetime of a fluorescent species is defined as the time for the fluorescence emission reduced to \(1/e\) of its initial intensity following excitation by a pulse of light with negligible duration. In this paper a method is presented which can be applied to analyze the three dimensional excitation-emission frequency array in which the measured emission intensity is a function of excitation wavelength, emission wavelength and modulation frequency. It is shown that the method can uniquely resolve individual spectra and extract lifetimes, provided that the fluorescence lifetimes for the individual components are different. No individual conjectures are needed for the unknown spectra, and the number of components that can be resolved is limited only by the number of excitations or emission wavelengths and by the signal to noise ratio.