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Date of Award

Spring 2012

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Chemistry

First Advisor

Dr. Carol Parish

Abstract

The fluorescence of a molecule vs. its concentration is generally described by applying Beer’s law to the incident light and determining the amount of energy absorbed by the molecule. In the simplest case, fluorescence is directly proportional to concentration. However, experimentally it has been shown that as concentration increases further, the fluorescence begins to decrease. This is caused by effects such as internal filtering, scatter, and re-fluorescence. Re-fluorescence occurs when the emission and excitation spectra overlap, while the inner filter effect is absorption of the emission wavelength. This study attempts to model the re- fluorescence and inner filtering in linear systems. By applying Beer’s law to both the incident light and the fluorescence, a function describing the amount of light within the cuvette was obtained. The fluorescence of the solution was then solved from this function. The model exhibits an initial linear increase of fluorescence as concentration increases followed by an

eventual peaking and fall as internal filtering begins to take effect.

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