Single-Photon-Decay Spectroscopy by Means of a Laplace Transform Method: Application to a Crystal of TMMC

Abstract

In order to demonstrate the applicaton of a Laplace transform method to a real experiment of single-photon-decay spectroscopy, we have measured the lifetime of the 4 T1 state of Mn2+ in an undoped TMMC crystal at room temperature. The theoretical predictions for exponentially decaying signals have been reported in a previous work by means of a computer simulation of the experiment. The experimental results obtained in this work by means of the Laplace transform method show its goodness for obtaining lifetimes of long-lived levels at low fluorescence intensities (less than one photon per lifetime). Other integration methods are presented for improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the detected signal.