Excitation-emission-lifetime analysis of multicomponent systems—II. Synthetic model data

To determine the efficacy of three-dimensional principal component factor analysis (PCFA) for extracting non-exponential decay parameters from multicomponent data, we have constructed synthetic data matrices which mimic the possible outcomes of experiments in the nanosecond time domain with copper porphyrins. Our results demonstrate that PCFA is capable of determining non-exponential time decay in systems with two and three emitting species. The accuracy of the rate constants determined by this method is limited by the accuracy of the non-linear Marquardt algorithm that we have used for the final fits. Although extremely overlapped components have been resolved using this method, degeneracy in one of the dimensions is problematic.