Estimation of confidence intervals in calculation of the distribution of luminescence lifetimes from the kinetics of multiexponential decay

Abstract

A new approach to the calculation of the luminescence lifetime distribution from experimental luminescence kinetics of multiexponential decay is proposed, which is based on the Tikhonov regularization method with allowance for the estimation of confidence intervals in solving linear inverse problems under the condition of non-negativity of the solution. The proposed approach permits finding solutions with almost optimum degree of smoothness, and analyzing them for the presence of artifacts caused by the ill-posedness of the problem.