Within the past few decades, lanthanide elements have become an intensely active area of research. These elements have desirable properties that can be exploited for applications such as laser gain mediums, fluorescent indicators, television phosphors, as well as many other applications (Bunzli 2005). As such, a theoretical understanding of lanthanide elements is vital to engineering practical uses for these elements.
Understanding the chemical and physical properties of these elements requires experimental and theoretical investigations of the electron configuration of a lanthanide atom. A common way to determine these electron configuration properties is through spectroscopy, which allows experimenters to investigate the internal structure of lanthanide atoms through the atom's absorption and emission of light. Unfortunately, not all lanthanide ions are readily amendable to standard spectroscopic techniques due to low probabilities of absorbing passing photons. Such is the case for europium.
The recent advancements of absorption spectroscopic methods has allowed tricky elements like europium to be probed. In the past few years, several research groups have shown that it is possible to probe low concentrations of soluble absorbers in a liquid medium using cavity techniques to enhance the absorption signal, allowing investigations of aqueous lanthanide solutions to be better understood.
This report provides an introduction to absorption spectroscopy and some preliminary experimental results on the investigations of aqueous europium ions and coordination complexes. The information collected provides a pathway for moving forward with investigations of europium complexes, and provides potential applications that combine absorption spectroscopy with europium complexes for spectroscopic assays.
The objective of this report is to perform two functions. The first is to validate previous BBCEAS results, and perform an analysis of the errors that occur when using a BBCEAS instrument. The second purpose of this report is to analyse the electronic configuration of europium from both a theoretical and experimental standpoint in an attempt to determine uses for aqueous europium ions and complexes.
The chapters in this report are laid out as follows.
- Chapter 1 introduces absorption spectroscopy, some common experimental techniques, and the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques relative to each other.
- Chapter 2 provides an introduction to broadband cavity enhanced absorption spectroscopy, which was used for the investigations of aqueous europium ions and complexes. In addition, this chapter details the experimental setup, algorithms used for processing data, and a discussion of future improvements.
- Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical understandings of europium electronic transitions and how these theories are reflected in the observed europium spectra.
- Chapter 4 discusses calibration measurements that were performed, and several sources of error in the measurements collected.
- Chapter 5 discusses experimental results from measuring aqueous europium ions.
- Chapter 6 concludes the report with a discussion of the acquired results and steps to take in the future to both complete theoretical investigations of europium complexes and how to use the results of this report to build sensitive protein assays.
Simply run make. This will compile all of the plot PDFs as well.