Collisional energy transfer and quenching of electronic excitation.

The purpose of this paper has been to explore in a preliminary way the nature and mechanism of collisional energy transfer and quenching of electronic excitation. For this purpose, the Born approximation has been used, and the triplet-triplet and singlet-singlet transfer, and the triplet-triplet and singlet-singlet quenching have been studied. It has been shown theoretically that (i) the singlet-singlet transfer constants (or cross sections) are always larger than the triplet-triplet transfer constants (or cross sections) for the same system of donor and acceptor; (ii) for the singlet-singlet transfer, the observed cross section varies linearly with respect to the spectral overlap between the donor emission and the acceptor absorption; (iii) the reason that the quenching constants (or cross sections) are always smaller than the energy transfer constants (or cross sections) is due to the fact that for the quenching the vibration of the acceptor hardly participates in accepting the electronic excitation and for the energy transfer only part of the excited electron energy of the donor is converted into the energy of nuclear motion; and (iv) the polar acceptor molecules are better quenchers than nonpolar acceptor molecules.