Electronic excitation transfer in concentrated micelle solutions

Electronic excitation transport among interacting clusters of chromophores is investigated as a function of chromophores is investigated as a function of chromophore and cluster concentration. The technique of time-correlated single photon counting is employed to obtain time-resolved fluorescence depolarization data on aqueous octadecylrhodamine B/triton X-100 micelle solutions. The time-dependent fluorescence anisotropy, the energy transport observable, is directly compared to a theory developed to model this system. The theory is based on a first-order cumulant approximation to the solution of the transport master equation. The model depicts the micelles as monodisperse hard spheres with chromophores (octadecylrhodamine B) distributed about their surfaces. At low micelle concentration, the dynamics of excitation transfer depend only on internal micelle structure. At high micelle concentration excitation transfer occurs among chromophores on different micelles in addition to intramicelle transfer. The theoretical treatment provides nearly quantitative descriptions of the time and concentration dependence of the excitation transport. It correctly predicts the concentration at which intermicelle transfer becomes significant. In the low micelle concentration limit (energy transport confined to isolated micelles) the model having a Poisson distribution of chromophores works well for small {nu} ([chromophores]/[micelle]), but progressively worse as {nu} is increased. Following the literature, a chromophere interaction parameter (in the form of a two dimensional second virial coefficient) is used to skew the probe distribution. This enables the transport theory to reproduce the data for all the values of {nu} investigated and provides a determination of the second virial coefficient. 34 refs., 4 figs., 2 tabs.