Radiationless Energy Transfer Between Rare-Earth Ions in Solutions and its Application to the Investigation of Complexation Processes

Radiationless energy transfer between rare-earth ions (Ln³⁺) in solutions has some features: 1) the electronic transitions in Ln³⁺ complexes causing the luminescence of energy donor and the absorption of energy acceptors are forbidden by Laporte's rule and are weakly intensive. Therefore the critical radius (R_o) of energy transfer between the rare-earth ions for dipole-dipole mechanism is close to that for exchange-resonant mechanism. This fact presents difficulties for unequivocal interpretation of the energy transfer mechanism. 2) The plus-three lanthanide ions exist in solution as a set of complexes with different number of charged ligands in the inner coordination sphere and hence with different total charge of complexes.