Time-resolved and continuous-wave circular polarisation of luminescence spectroscopy using a commercial spectrofluorimeter

Abstract
An instrument is described for time-resolved (TR) detection of circular polarisation of the luminescence (CPL). The TR-CPL spectrometer combines the optical part of a commercially available gated photon-counting spectrofluorimeter with the differential photon-counting system of a home-built continuous-wave (CW) CPL instrument described previously. The resulting spectrometer is sensitive and accurate, and allows for the determination of circular (and linear) polarisation data in the time domain 10 mu s-100 ms. Similarly, a CW photon-counting spectrofluorimeter can be transformed into a high performance CPL spectrometer.