The chapter outlines general principles of fluorescence spectroscopy. Basic principles of radiative and nonradiative transitions (including the Jablonski diagram and Franck-Condon principle) are described and explained.
The fundamentals of important fluorescence techniques, such as the steady-state and time-resolved measurements, fluorescence anisotropy, solvent relaxation method, fluorescence quenching, and nonradiative energy transfer, are discussed in detail. Special attention is devoted to the fast dynamics of individual transitions and processes influencing them at the molecular level.
The end of the chapter focuses on excimers and exciplexes and mainly on the weakly bound complexes (so-called J and H aggregates), because the literature describing their behavior is relatively rare and pertinent pieces of information are not easy to find.