INTERMICELLAR MOBILITY OF PROBE AND QUENCHER IN REVERSE MICELLES STUDIED BY FLUORESCENCE QUENCHING

Simultaneous analysis of the fluorescence decay surface obtained from the quenching of sodium 1-pyrene-sulfonate by N-tetradecylpyridinium chloride and sodium iodide in the reverse micellar system of N-benzyl,N,N-dimethyltetradecylammonium um chloride in toluene with pentanol as a cosurfactant is applied to investigate intermicellar migration of probe and quencher. The previously reported general fluorescence quenching model for monodisperse micelles is used within the framework of the global analysis with reference convolution. The results indicate the presence of fast intermicellar mobility of. reactants during the excited-state lifetime of the probe. The rate constants of intermicellar mobility become higher than the diffusion-controlled limit in a collision process of micelles at a water-to-surfactant molar ratio w > 16, independent of the quencher used. This fact is ascribed to the clustering of the reverse micelles. The average number of micelles per cluster and the cluster aggregation number are estimated from the data obtained by fluorescence quenching.