Engineering360: "New Glow Stick Discovery could Help Detect Cancer"

Does this mean the professor broke the quantum yield barrier? I don't know, but I seem to remember fluorescence quantum yields that were in fact higher than unity for one particular class of compounds, but I fail to remember which. φ will get you every time.

Not recalling the compounds, but I do recall that the basic process starts with one (but not every one) of the first luminescence photons inspired by the mechanical input whacking an adjacent atom in just the right vector pattern to pop off two (or more?), photons all of which converge somewhat hyperbolically to a steady state of maximum luminescence for the fluorescing mass.

Intuitively, it would seem that chemical transformations associated therewith would gradually diminish the photon production rate/density, introducing a bit of confounding variable in quantifying (relating) the luminescence to the magnitude of phenomena (tumor?) desired to be measured. Detecting is one thing; measuring is another.