Dual emission is a reality in many, but not all, ruthenium complex ions, even at room temperature and in fluid solution. It requires significantly different ligands and is more obvious in rigid media such as glasses at low temperature and crystalline powders. However, there are not just two unique lifetimes. Rather, there is a continuum of similar but slightly different lifetimes drawn from a bimodal distribution. In some of the cases that do not show dual emission, there still seems to be a continuum within a unimodal distribution. After reviewing a wide range of data, we describe possible interpretations. Most novel, but in our view most attractive, is a major role for ion pairing. If one admits that ions near charge transfer orbitals should have a stabilizing effect, and if one doubts that there would be any unique configuration for ion pairs, then it would seem that a continuous variation of excited state behavior is mandatory. This mechanism accounts for the fact that highly asymmetric substitutions at the 4-position of the phen ligand that most affects charge transfer always show dual emission and offer the most exaggerated differences between the two emissions. Other possibilities remain, given the data available at this time.

Superfluid He4 is a promising target material for direct detection of light (<1 GeV) dark matter. Possible signal channels available for readout in this medium include prompt photons, triplet excimers, and roton and phonon quasiparticles. The relative yield of these signals has implications for the sensitivity and discrimination power of a superfluid He4 dark matter detector. Using a 16 cm3 volume of 1.75 K superfluid He4 read out by six immersed photomultiplier tubes, we measured the scintillation from electronic recoils ranging between 36.3 and 185 keVee, yielding a mean signal size of 1.25-0.03+0.03 phe/keVee, and nuclear recoils from 53.2 to 1090 keVnr. We compare the results of our relative scintillation yield measurements to an existing semiempirical model based on helium-helium and electron-helium interaction cross sections. We also study the behavior of delayed scintillation components as a function of recoil type and energy, a further avenue for signal discrimination in superfluid He4.