A comparison between different excitation/detection systems for luminescence lifetime based instrumentation

There are several interesting optical sensors based on the measurement of the decay time of luminescence quenching. Traditional systems to measure luminescence decay times use flash lamps as light sources and photomultipliers as transducers because of the characteristics of the sensors. Such equipment is large and expensive and cannot be considered practical for many purposes. In this paper, a comparison between different systems to measure phosphorescence lifetimes is presented. Four different combinations of light source and photo detector have been tested in order to determine their interest. The objective is to replace traditional devices by solid-state devices.